Safety deposit boxes containing more than one million euros fell off the back of a lorry in Germany! They were found by a soldier, who returned them to the authorities two days after they were lost.
A €20 note measures 133 mm x 72 mm and is approximately 0.11 mm thick. It weighs about one gram.
How much would one million euros weigh? How much space would it take up? A Volkswagen Golf has a boot which will hold 505 litres – would it fit in there?
In films, you’ll often see a case with money neatly packed inside. The inside of this case is 35 cm x 45 cm x 11 cm and weighs 2.5 kg. How many €20 notes could you fit inside? Would you be able to lift it?
It’s in the News! It fell off the back of a lorry! Teacher Notes
Activity It fell off the back of a lorry! Description This resource is aimed at developing an understanding of volume and unit conversion. It also has the potential to practise some of the functional skills, particularly modelling a situation and interpreting results. Prompts and probing questions The PowerPoint offers two situations to work on. The first is exploring the volume of one million euros in €20 notes, asking if they could fit into the boot of a VW Golf. The second context uses the attaché cases often seen filled with dollar bills in the movies and asks how much money it might hold and whether the students would be able to lift it. The two situations could be used one after the other, or you might choose to use just one. Other questions might include: (after the first slide) What mathematical questions might you ask about this story? if the notes were laid out as a ‘carpet’ how much space would they cover? The classroom? The school hall? A football pitch? what might the dimensions of a cuboid that holds 505 litres be? is it possible to have more than one cuboid with the same volume? What’s the ‘smallest’ space that the notes would fit into? if €50 instead of €20 notes were used, how much more would the case be worth? Extension The walls of a cast iron safe need to be 90 mm thick to be secure. 1 m 3 of cast iron weighs kg. Is it possible to design a cast iron safe that can be carried by a security guard? How many €20 notes would it hold? Assessment If you use the APP model of assessment then the areas to assess could include: solve word problems and investigations from a range of contexts (using and applying mathematics level 5) deduce and use formula for… the volume of a cuboid; calculate volume and surface area of cuboids (shape, space and measure level 6) solve problems and carry through substantial tasks by breaking them into smaller, more manageable tasks… give solutions to an appropriate degree of accuracy (using and applying mathematics level 6).