Dear wow: one of the few things I remember from college math is "Explore the means and extremes". If you think of trying to mow a lawn 100 feet by 440 feet, you can get bewildered particularly if you go round and round it in a nest of diminishing squares. But a certified genius like me
will think;"What if the lawn were ten inches wide, how long would it have to be to be an acre?" Then it is trivial.Every computer has a calculator. Work it out. If the swath were a foot wide, the lawn would be 44,000 long.
If the swath is 10 inches, that is 5/6 feet. 44,000 divided by 5/6 equals 52,800. Since 5,280 feet equals one mile, in mowing that long skinny lawn you would have had to walk TEN miles.
I had fun one day working this out in my head, while mowing a lawn thankfully nowhere near an acre. I'd never have finished it.
