Can You Drink a Whole Lake?

How long would it take to drink a whole lake? Well, you’d better hope it’s a small lake! Look at a 1/2 gallon of milk: that’s already a lot to drink. Now imagine a 1-foot wide cube…it would hold about 8 gallons, or 16 cartons. And now imagine a square-ish lake 200 feet wide and long, and 100 feet deep. That would holds 200 x 200 x 100 = 4 million of those cubes, or 64 million cartons. You’ll need a pretty fat straw for that!

Wee ones: If you could drink 5 whole swimming pools, what numbers do you say to count them?

Little kids: If a “little” lake holds 9 swimming pools of water and you’ve drunk 5 pools of water, how many pools of water do you have left to drink? Count up to find out!  Bonus: If you make it to only halfway between 5 and 9, how many swimming pools do you drink in total?

Big kids: If a lake holds “just” 8 million gallons, how many people can drink it down if each person drinks just 1/4 gallon? (Hint if needed: That means it takes 4 people to drink each gallon.)  Bonus: If you could drink 10 whole swimming pools every 10 minutes, could you empty a 100-pool lake in 1 hour?

The sky’s the limit: Lake Superior in the U.S. holds 3 quadrillion gallons of water! Can you “spell” 3 quadrillion in digits? Hint: A quadrillion is one thousand trillions, and a trillion is one thousand billions.

Answers:
Wee ones: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Little kids: 4 more pools’ worth of water.  Bonus: 7 pools.

Big kids: 32 million people, because each gallon needs 4 people tackling it. That’s almost all the people in Canada.  Bonus: No: there are only 6 10-minute chunks in an hour, so you could drink only 60 pools in an hour. Another way to think of it: 10 pools in 10 minutes is 1 pool per minute, so that’s 60 in an hour.

The sky’s the limit: 3,000,000,000,000,000 gallons!

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