Missions and Math
How much water do you use in a day? Think about your showers, drinking, food preparation, and even what your dog drinks! Can you imagine getting all the water you would need for six months?! That’s a lot of water!
The missionaries out here in the centre of Australia would have to get all the water they would need from the rain! They used rain catchments to get the water and a whole bunch of big tanks to hold it!
We can use so simple multiplication to find out how much water they would need to collect. First we need some givens, or facts that we can work off of.
Givens:
The average person needs about 4 litres of water a day to wash, drink and cook with.
The mission, while still using the rain catchments, had about 20 people in all using the supply.
The dry season would last about 6 months a year on average (Sometimes it would be more, and sometimes less, but we will go with 6 months as an average).
The Math:
The amount of water a person uses in 6 months can be found by multiplying first by 7 (the number of days in week), then by 4 (4 weeks in a month), then by 6 (6 months in the dry season).
4 x 7 x 4 x 6 = 672
A person would use 672 litres in 6 months! That’s crazy!
How many litres would 20 people use in 6 months?
672 x 20 = 13, 440
20 people would use 13, 440 litres in 6 months! Wow!
With this number in their mind, the missionaries could find out what quantity of water their water tanks would hold.
As the mission got bigger and swelled with an overwhelming amount of people, they had to put in a pipeline from a spring about 8 kilometres away!
Suggested activities:
If you and a about 15 other mates, or friends were going to go and set up a community in the middle of nowhere, could you find out how much water you would need to have available?
Think about how long at a time that it wouldn’t rain for.
How much water would you use in a day?
Also, would you ever wash up?…
By,
Crister