Around the World: How Tall is Tall?

You might be wondering how all of these tall buildings and monuments I've been seeing stack up against each other. Sometimes, things look really big because there isn't anything else around it, or because everything else around it is very short. Sometimes, buildings can look shorter than they are because they're surrounded by really tall things. Here, I'll line them up to show you how tall they really are.

First, let's do a quick review of the standard units of measurement. I like to use a saying to help me remember the metric units:

"King Henry's Daughter Makes Delicious Chocolate Milk"

The first letter of each word stands for a unit of measurement:

Kilometers Hectometers Decameters Meters Decimeters Centimeters Millimeters

Or, in their short forms: km hm Dm  m dm  cm  mm

If you can remember this saying, then you'll remember the order of the units of measurement and easily be able to tell how many of one unit is equal to one of something else. For example, there are 10 mm in 1 cm; there are 10 cm in 1 dm. There are 10 dm in 1 m, and so on.

I will use meters to show how tall these buildings are. If you can picture a meter stick, then you'll have an reference to go by. For me, 1 m is equal to the distance between my feet and my hips.

So, let's take a look at the height of these World Famous Buildings standing side-by-side.

     

Eiffel Tower, France: 324 m                St George's church, Ethiopia: 12 m

          

  Faro, Uruguay: 34 m                        Shiva statue, Mauritius: 33 m 

           

Qutb Minar, India: 73 m                 Calgary Tower, Canada: 191 m

     

CN Tower, Canada: 553 m                        Taj Mahal, India: 73 m

To see the difference in height between these structures, it would be even easier if we graphed them. I'll start by putting the heights up the y axis (the vertical line), and the names of the structures along the x axis (the horizontal line). Then, I'll use bars to show their heights. Now, I can really see how tall the CN Tower is compared with the other structures!

Organizing information in a graph is a great way to make more sense of it!

Mauritius

 



After a quick four days in Réunion, we flew to Mauritius, an island that was owned by the British, but is now independent. It seemed to be in the middle in terms of quality of life - much better than Madagascar, where people are very poor, but not as high of a standard of living as Réunion.

In Mauritius, children learn French and a local Creole language at home, then learn English when they go to school, so communicating was very easy for us. The island makes its money mainly from sugarcane crops, tea plantations, and other agriculture. It had rolling hills and beautiful beaches (that are protected from coral reefs, so swimming is safe!).

The beach at Blue Bay

For my quick four days on the island, I ate lots of delicious food, which is a mix of Indian, Chinese, and Creole (so lots of chicken fried rice for me!), and they make use of the local deer and wild boar.

I relaxed at a beautiful beach called Blue Bay, which was on the south-east shore, and toured the sites of the South. Here were a few highlights:

Grand Bassin: A Sacred Hindu Lake

A giant statue depicting the Hindu lord Shiva

The waterfall in Chamarel

The giant tortoises in Chamarel's protected area

The Seven Coloured Earths of Chamarel

The beach at La Morne