Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt won the 100 meter sprint gold medal in the 2012 Summer Olympics. He ran the 100 meter race in 9.63 seconds. There are about 3.28 feet in a meter and 5280 feet in a mile. What was Usain Bolt's average speed for the 100 meter race in miles per hour?

IM Commentary

This task involves a multi-step conversion between two rates, going from meters per second to miles per hour. In this case, the units coming from the 100 meter race are meters per second and we do not have a good intuition for what this means in miles per hour. Most of us are used to thinking about speeds in terms of miles per hour since the speedometers in our automobiles use these units, so it is good for students to be able to convert between miles per hour and other units for speed that naturally come up.

The first solution shows all units in the calculations and does not make any calculations until the end. The second solution goes step by step and provides an excellent opportunity to discuss rounding error as it is important here to make all calculations (as in the first method) before rounding rather than using the rounded numbers for successive calculations.

In addition to the work on conversion of units, it might be interesting to compare the top speed of the fastest human being to some familiar animals:

Animal Top Speed (in mph) Hippopotamus 19 Kangaroo 45 Horse 47 Gazelle 50 Cheetah 70

Remarkably, of the animals in the table, the fastest human beings can only run faster than the hippopotamus. Note that the speed calculated in this problem is the average speed for 100 meters which is a little less than the top speed, but 23mph is significantly less than any of the other animals on the list. For a more creative implementation of this task, the teacher could provide the table of different animal speeds and ask the students how the fastest human beings would fair against them in a race.

The relevant practice standards for this problem are MP2, Reason abstractly and quantitatively, as students move between the context and the calculations, and MP6, Attend to precision, as students must focus on units and the accuracy with which they present their final answer. Note that both the time for the 100 meter race and the conversion from meters to feet are given with three digit, so only three digits should remain in the answer. Also, given the number of steps required to solve this problem, it is well aligned to MP1, Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.

Given the complexity of the problem, it would not be appropriate for high-stakes summative assessment but would be very appropriate in an instructional setting.