The Texas star at Fair Park in Dallas, Texas, is the tallest ferris wheel in the United States. A 2 1/2- FOOT TALL CHILD STANDING NEXT TO THE FERRIS WHEEL CAST A 2 FOOT SHADOW AT THE SAME TIME THE FERRIS WHEELS SHADOWS IS 170 FEET.HOW TALL IS THE TEXAS STAR

Can anyone tell me the proportion for it

What do you think? (show your work)

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Originally Posted by acidj14

The texas star at Fair Park in Dallas, Texas, is the tallest ferris wheel in the United States. A 2 1/2- FOOT TALL CHILD STANDING NEXT TO THE FERRIS WHEEL CAST A 2 FOOT SHADOW AT THE SAME TIME THE FERRIS WHEELS SHADOWS IS 170 FEET.HOW TALL IS THE TEXAS STAR

can anyone tell me the proportion for it

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I will try and figure this out while I am typing, so let's see... for every two feet of shadow of the Texas star, add a half a foot, right? That would be, had to use the calculator. I may be wrong, but I came up with 212.5 feet, which is 170 divided by 2 which equals 85 and then divide 85 in half, which is 42.5 and add it to 170 and you get = 212.5 this is because if the kid is two and a half feet tall, that means for each 2 feet of the ferris wheel, add a half a foot to get the proportion. I googled for the height of the Texas Star and I got that it is 65 meters tall, which converts to 213.254593 feet, which is really close to my figure, but not exact.

The easy way to do the problem is to figure out that the child's shadow is 4/5ths of the kid's height. So then if you take 170 and divide by the proportion of 4/5ths, then you end up with 170 times 5, then divide that by 4. Remember when you divide by a fraction you have to multiply by the denominator and then divide that by the numerator... the answer comes out to 212.5 feet

The proportion is 4 units of shadow for every 5 units of height. In this case the unit would be half a foot. You would get the same answer if you decided to convert it to inches or whatever...