ShmoopTube

00:03

Here's a question to give your brain a solid shmooping...

00:06

Sarah is taking swim lessons from Aquaman in a swimming pool with a length of 50 meters.

00:12

If Sarah is required to swim three lengths of this pool, how far, to the nearest foot,

00:17

will she need to swim? Hint: 1 meter is approximately 1.083 yards.

00:24

And here are the potential answers:

00:32

OK, this is a standard conversion question-- meters to feet...

00:36

...with the wild and crazy tricky curveball thrown in there that she's swimming 3 laps.

00:41

Ooh. Brutal. Aquaman is apparently a very demanding instructor.

00:45

So we need to convert 150 meters into uh... how many feet?

00:50

Just rounding and assuming we don't have a calculator or an iPhone or a geeky kid handy

00:54

to do the math in his head...we can figure this one out fast.

00:58

A meter is roughly 1.1 yards -- i.e. a meter is a bit longer than a yard.

01:03

So it makes sense that the number of yards would be a bit longer...

01:07

and if it was exactly 1.1 times longer...

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...we could multiple the 150 meters by 1.1 to get roughly 165 yards...

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...but they want the ANSWER in feet -- so multiply that 165 by 3 and we get 495...

01:24

...which is close enough to 487 for military work.

01:28

The answer is D.

01:29

As in... "Dweller of the Depths"

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