I think you’re overthinking it. The first thing you’re told when you learn algebra is that a letter represents a number and you can say “let a equal (number), b equal (number)…” so you can let pi equal whatever you want for the purposes of one simple problem.
Well, if we want to be pedantic, they never said that h is the height and r is the radius of the base circle. They could be just random numbers.
Also, since we never calculate with all the digits of pi, it is not any less weird to round to the nearest 5 and say that it’s 5, than to the nearest 0.01 and saying it’s 3.14. It just has a higher amount of rounding error.
I think you’re overthinking it. The first thing you’re told when you learn algebra is that a letter represents a number and you can say “let a equal (number), b equal (number)…” so you can let pi equal whatever you want for the purposes of one simple problem.
But the question is saying to find the volume of a cylinder. Which its clearly wrong.
Well, if we want to be pedantic, they never said that h is the height and r is the radius of the base circle. They could be just random numbers.
Also, since we never calculate with all the digits of pi, it is not any less weird to round to the nearest 5 and say that it’s 5, than to the nearest 0.01 and saying it’s 3.14. It just has a higher amount of rounding error.
Why are we upset by rounding to the nearest 5 for elementary schoolers when we round to 10 m/s/s for gravity in collegiate physics classes anyway?
It’s not even a bad thing to do for quick mental calculations, if you know that you will overshoot. Multiplying by 5 is easy.
You’re talking about variables. But, pi isn’t a variable, it is a constant number. This would be more akin to saying “let 7 = 9”.
Well I suppose for example rounding to the nearest integer is a method of implying “let 1.8 = 2”, no? Not too outlandish, I don’t think.