SEARCH HOME
Math CentralQuandaries & Queries

search

Question from Robert:

I am having a problem at work that I am hoping someone can help me figure out. I have a pest control company and we are pretreating the soil for a new hospital being built. The company that we are working has asked to also treat a 5 foot strip around the entire building and for us to get paid we need to figure out what the square footage of this 5 foot strip around the building that we are treating. The structure being built is a hospital and as you can imagine the building has all kinds of nooks and offsets and even some of the wall are cruved more like a circle. I already know the square footage of the building itself because they gave us this information. The square footage of the building is 120,000 SqFt. I would greatly appreciate if someone can help me figure out the square footage of a 5 foot strip around a 120,000 SqFt building who's walls have a lot of insets and odd shapes. I don't if someone can figure out the square footage of the 5 foot strip with the inf
ormation I gave. I would greatly appreciate any help that you can give me. I need this information for work because we charge for pretreatment of soil by the square footage of the area to be treated and I need this information so that I don't over charge the company we are working for or so I don't cheat myself either. Any and all help we be greatly appreciated because I don't know who else that can help me.

Robert,

You need to have a diagram of the building's footprint. Draw a 5 foot strip around the outside, and then carve it up into rectangles and triangles by adding extra lines. The area you want is the sum of the areas of these shapes. Calculate the are of each one and add them all together.

Victoria

About Math Central
 

 


Math Central is supported by the University of Regina and The Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences.
Quandaries & Queries page Home page University of Regina PIMS