Scary slopes

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.

A screenshot of the spreadsheet construction

  1. Open Microsoft Excel. Place the heading SKI LIFT ANALYSIS in cell A1. Save the file.

  2. Enter the information from the guide into your spreadsheet under the following column headings NAME, LIFT TYPE, LENGTH and V. RISE.

  3. Add two new columns H. RUN (format to 0 decimal places) and SLOPE (format to 2 decimal places).

  4. 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.

  5. Select the heading cells of your table and apply the filter from the editing (sort) tab.

Using your spreadsheet, consider these questions:

  1. Does the chairlift with the highest vertical rise have the steepest slope? What about the slope of the chairlift with the lowest vertical rise?

  2. T-Bars are sometimes considered ‘scarier’ than a chairlift. In your opinion, has the “Easy rider” been appropriately named? Explain.

  3. 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.