Real-Life Math
As an aquaculturalist, you must be able to use math.
You
are an aquaculture technician at a saltwater fish farm located in a sheltered
bay.
It's your first job after college. Now your boss is taking a month-long
vacation overseas to evaluate new forms of aquaculture being tried out in
Denmark and Russia. He's leaving you in charge.
You're comfortable
with this arrangement; after all, you've been doing most of the work yourself
anyway. But a few critical decisions and actions will be left up to you. One
involves feeding the fish.
Your farm raises salmon. The standard formula
for feed is 5 liters of pellet food for each cubic meter each day. (The feed
is imported and comes in metric measurements.) However, the formula
changes based on several factors, including the temperature and other weather
conditions.
Just 2 weeks after your boss leaves, an early blast of
winter arrives. You have to adjust the feed to suit the weather, or else you
will risk losing many of the valuable fish you were left in charge of.
Here's
the information you need:
- The total area of your fish farm is 15,000 cubic meters.
- The cold weather formula requires that for each degree below 10 C the
temperature drops, you must add 2 percent to the total feed.
- On this day, the temperature is -2 C.
How much food will you release for the fish to eat today?