Families line up for slice of 4,724-metre long cake to celebrate Three Kings Feast
Several thousand people gathered in Mexico City's huge Zocalo plaza on Thursday evening to partake in a gigantic Three Kings Day cake known as a "rosca."The monumental rosca weighed in at 9,371 kilos (20,660 lbs) and measured 4,724 metres long (15,500 ft) before it was cut up into giant pieces and given to anyone wanting a piece.
Mexico makes mammoth 'torta sandwich'
An army of chefs in Mexico City on Wednesday (July 27) crafted a 66-metre (###-foot) monster "torta" sandwich - making it the biggest sandwich of its kind ever made in Latin America.Local authorities and dozens of local business rolled up their sleeves to prepare the mega sandwich in less than 4 minutes - known as "torta" in Mexico.
Despite its super size, the sandwich didn't quite make it into the big league.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the largest sandwich ever made was in 2005 in the United States and weighed ### kg (11,993 lb), while the honor of the longest sandwich goes to Lebanon with a sandwich over 7.5 meters (2,411 feet) long in 2011.
What questions can be asked/answered?
Here are a few ideas:
1) What is the conversion between kg and lbs in the first article?
2) What is the conversion between metres and feet in the first article?
3) What is the weight of cake per metre?
4) How many pieces of
cake might there be?
5) In the second
article, how long (in feet) was the torta?
6) What was the weight
in kg of the biggest sandwich ever made?
7) What is the error in
the final sentence?
8) How did the longest
sandwich compare with the cake?
9) If you could keep it
fresh, for how long would the cake/sandwich feed one person?
Answers:
1) 1kg = 2.205 lb
2) 1m = 3.28 ft
3) 1.98kg per metre
4) The cake can’t be
more than about ½ metre wide (otherwise it wouldn’t fit in an oven), so we
might assume an area of 4724 x ½ = 2362 square metres. If each piece has an area of 10cm by 10cm
then there will be 100 pieces in a square metre. This would give 236200 pieces; about a
quarter of a million!
5) Using the conversion
from the first article we get 216.55m.
The second article gives 216-foot.
6) Using the conversion
from the first article we get 5440kg, which is what the second article gives.
7) In the final
sentence the unusual spellings (‘honor’ and ‘meter’) are because this is using
American English. The error is the
conversion: 7.5 meters (2,411 feet). 2411 feet is
actually 735 metres.
8) Using the measurements
given in feet, the longest sandwich is 15.6% of the length of the cake.
9) In Subway they sell ‘foot-long’
sandwiches. One of those per day would
mean the sandwich would last 2411 days, which is 6 years and 31 weeks.
The cake would last for
80 years if you had 8 pieces per day.
