Scary slopes
The Thredbo Winter Guide 2009 classifies the suitability of its ski trails from ‘first timers’ up to ‘most difficult’. It also provides a useful table for us to check out the ‘scariness’ of the gradient of each ski-lift. Open the guide here (PDF 1MB) and locate the table of lift information on page 2.
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Open Microsoft Excel. Place the heading SKI LIFT ANALYSIS in cell A1. Save the file.
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Enter the information from the guide into your spreadsheet under the following column headings NAME, LIFT TYPE, LENGTH and V. RISE.
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Add two new columns H. RUN (format to 0 decimal places) and SLOPE (format to 2 decimal places).
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Create a formula (from the distance and midpoint formulae) in the first cell of each column. Refer to the cells in other columns. Fill down to complete the other entries.
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Select the heading cells of your table and apply the filter from the editing (sort) tab.
Using your spreadsheet, consider these questions:
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Does the chairlift with the highest vertical rise have the steepest slope? What about the slope of the chairlift with the lowest vertical rise?
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T-Bars are sometimes considered ‘scarier’ than a chairlift. In your opinion, has the “Easy rider” been appropriately named? Explain.
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If you were placed in charge of classifying the ski-lifts into three ‘scariness’ categories for skiers, how would you make that decision?
Use Microsoft Publisher or another document creation tool to produce a one-page information flyer for beginning skier groups attending the ski fields to convince them that ski-lifts are NOT so scary. Insert your spreadsheet as an object and include other relevant images, text and mathematical explanations to persuade the audience.