Soup Can of Hornby Island

My immediate approach at solving this problem is to find the measurements of an actual can of Campbell's soup and the approximate dimensions of the bike in the picture and use ratios to solve for the volume of the giant soup can. Let's see how this goes...

I bought a Campbell's soup can and found approximate measurements to be a height of 10.15 cm and the diameter to be 6.7 cm. I have to do research for the height of the bike but this is a little tricky because I'm not sure of the frame size of the bike. Assuming it is Susan's bike and going with a safe assumption that she would be riding a medium size bike this would give a frame size of about 17-18 inches. Based on some general Google searches I think a safe assumption can be made that the handle height sits at about 41.5 inches (https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1009/9108/files/ccs_size_chart_2048x2048.jpg?v=1562702484). The length of the bike is about 71.7 inches by the same assumption used for the height. 

Now, there is an obvious factor of the bike leaning against the can. The fact that it makes a shadow means that it is leaning at some angle so where the bike rests against the can is not 42 inches - it is something less. How much less? Now that is a tough question. There is also the issue of the fact that some of the can is lower into the ground than the bike rests. For sake of ease, I'm going to assume those two factors to approximately offset each other - we will then not take into account the leaning of the bike nor the portion of the can in the ground. 

Now, ratios. It looks like the can is about 3.5 times as tall as the bike and it looks like it is about 3 times as long. This would give the giant soup can measurements of diameter approximately 124.5 inches (316.23 cm) and height approximately 215.1 inches (546.35 cm). Therefore, the approximate volume of the giant soup can is approximately 42, 910, 835 cm cubed. This means it has a volume of about 42,911 litres. 

I don't know how much water it takes to put out an average house fire so I had to Google that as well. As per <https://awwd.com/card/fire-hydrants/#:~:text=Fire%20Hydrants%20are%20also%20used,to%20put%20out%20the%20fire.> it takes about 3000 gallons which is approximately 12000 litres of water so yes this soup can is able to hold enough water to fight a house fire. 

I never really got stuck while solving this problem but I took a very casual approach to it. In a black and white sense - I'm either going to get remarkably close or I'm going to be in the general ball park. I definitely will not be 100% spot on due to the various assumptions I'd have to make. 

I have learned something remarkably important over the last several months both at UBC and at my practicum placement - the importance of sound reasoning and estimation. In our assessment class when we discuss what we're looking for when assessing students the infamous question "when am I going to use this" always comes to me (looking at it now from a teacher's perspective). This has caused me to reflect on the math I use every day and I noticed that most often I use sound reasoning to take a best estimate and that usually works well enough. I decided to take that same approach to this question - hopefully I didn't butcher it too badly. 

I think a good extension for a senior level math class would be to figure out the volume of the shape that is below level ground (the part we cannot see in the picture).