Area and Volume of a Pear

Date: 6/4/96 at 0:4:16
From: Anonymous
Subject: Area and Volume of a Pear

How do you find the area and volume of a pear??

Date: 6/5/96 at 17:5:55
From: Doctor Ceeks
Subject: Re: Area and Volume of a Pear

The following method will give you a pretty good answer:

For volume: Take a bucket of water. Immerse your pear in the bucket
so it is completely covered. (You can use a teriyaki stick to keep 
the pear under.) Observe the change in water level. This tells you
how much water is displaced by the pear, and since water is 
incompressible, you can get the volume.

For area: This is somewhat harder to pull off. Take a bucket of 
chocolate syrup.  Dunk your pear in the bucket so as to completely
cover the pear with chocolate. Pull it out. Let it drip until it 
doesn't drip anymore. Figure out how much chocolate syrup it took to 
cover the pear by measuring the difference in the amount of syrup in 
the bucket before and after. The surface area of the pear is roughly 
proportional to this amount. To determine the constant of 
proportionality, perform the same procedure with a sphere of known 
surface area (use the formula 4*pi*r^2, where r is the radius of the 
sphere).

Important: Do not eat pear until after final measurements have been 
taken.

There are many other ways however, so see if you can find another.

-Doctor Ceeks,  The Math Forum
 Check out our web site!  http://mathforum.org/dr.math/