options: Modeling: students learn to choose and use appropriate mathematics and statistics to analyze real-world empirical situations, improve decisions, and report on their conclusions and the reasoning behind them.

Statistics & Probability: students learn to analyze and produce data distributions, and build understanding of univariate and bivariate data. They learn to interpret data, make statistical inferences, justify conclusions, understand rules of probability, and use probability to make decisions.

Counting & Cardinality: students learn to know number names and the count sequence, count to tell the number of objects, and compare numbers.

Functions: students learn to define, use, and evaluate functions to model relationships between quantities.

Number & Operations - Fractions: students learn to understand fractions as numbers and may work with them using addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

Geometry: students learn to classify geometric figures by their properties, and understand and compare the relationships between them. Students develop and use formulas to compute lengths, areas, and volumes, and they use transformations to generate new shapes and compare existing ones. Geometry can be studied with and without coordinates.

Number & Operations in Base Ten: students learn to work with the base-ten system and build place value understanding.

Number Systems and Quantity: students learn to understand the complex number system and reason quantitatively.

Ratios & Proportional Relationships: students learn to recognize, describe, represent, and reason with ratios, rates, proportional relationships, and percent.

Operations & Algebra: students learn to solve problems using algebraic thinking and operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. They may learn to identify and explain arithmetic patterns, evaluate or manipulate numerical expressions, and reason with equations and inequalities.

Measurement & Data: students learn to work with data and measure attributes such as time, money, length, area, and volume. They may learn to compare measurements to operations and convert between different units of measure.
problem_activity: Activity
In this activity, students calculate the surface area to volume ratios of animals with different shapes and think about how this ratio might be important in biology. Note that this is the first time students will be using formulas for the surface area and volume of a sphere, and that these formulas are given without derivation. Students used the sphere volume formula in grade 8.
Launch
“Assume a spherical cow” is a common joke about physics. Sometimes in physics, everything about the world is made as simple as possible. There is no air resistance, and everything is modeled with ideal shapes like a sphere or a point. Tell students they will do the same today with spherical elephants and cylindrical snakes.
Student Facing
For a sphere with radius
\(r\)
, its volume is
\(\frac43 \pi r^3\)
and its surface area is
\(4\pi r^2\)
.
Let’s model an elephant with a sphere that has a radius of 4.5 feet.
What is the volume of the elephant?
What is the surface area of the elephant?
Let’s model a snake with a cylinder of length 3 feet and diameter 0.2 feet.
What is the volume of the snake?
What is the surface area of the snake?
Compute the surface area to volume ratio, or
\(\frac{SA}{V}\)
, for each animal.
Student Response
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Activity Synthesis
Ask students how the surface area to volume ratio could affect the biology of snakes and elephants. The goal is for students to notice that the snake has a much higher ratio and to think about the impacts this may have.
One aspect of the biology is that elephants are warm-blooded, so to maintain a consistent body temperature, their bodies need to minimize the surface area through which heat enters or escapes their bodies. Snakes are cold-blooded, so their bodies maximize surface area in order to absorb heat from the environment through their skin.


correct_option_index: 0

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