question form

Your 'question form' report has been received. Scroll down through the document to see any comments I might have inserted, and my final comment at the end.

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yes

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I have been working on all of the Chapter 1 problems assigned from the book. I am having a hard time with the estimate problems starting with problem 25. I have read the chapter and that really did not help me. I am not sure how to estimate large things that I need to estimate in order to solve these problems.

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I understand how to do conversions, estimate order of magnitudes, etc.

I do not understand how to estimate the distance from New York to California, how many books will fit in a 3500m^2 room, gallons of gas used in USA in a year.

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I do not know how to get started to obtain the information I need to solve these estimate problems.

You don't need precise estimates. Try the following:

You should know how far it is across the U.S., at least to within 1000 miles. The circumference of the Earth at the equator is about 24,000 miles, which should also be common knowledge but probably isn't; if you look at a globe you can then get a reasonable estimate of how far it is across the U.S..

The approximate population of the U.S. should also be common knowledge. You could start from the world population, between 6 and 7 billion (should be common knowledge but I confess I didn't remember whether it had or had not passed 6 billion and had to Google 'world population'), and make a reasonable estimate.

You could measure a typical book, or just estimate its dimensions in inches and convert to metric units.