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(Describer) Titles: NM State University Learning Games Lab. A pencil writes the word "Presents." Multidimensional Thinking. A pencil draws a girl wearing glasses.

(narrator) So, you want to be a soil scientist. And why wouldn't you? Clearly you've proven yourself a suitable candidate, given your preoccupation with the pedosphere and your insatiable hunger for edaphology. Excellent choice! Our profession can use your bright mind, and there is a lot you're going to need to know. The first question most promising soil scientists have when embarking on this new career is most likely the same question you're asking yourself right now: What aspects of spacetime will be relevant to my newly chosen profession? Well, funny you should ask. As a soil scientist, you'll be working in one, two, three, fou-- Never mind. Nix that last one. You'll be working in three dimensions. You'll need to learn to take length, width, volume, and even mass into consideration and perhaps, just as importantly, how to document the difference between them. However, we don't want to get ahead of ourselves. So, we'll start with the basics-- the first dimension. A soil scientist depends on the first dimension for measuring distance between two locations, such as the distance between the top and the bottom of a cornstalk grown in fertile soil. Looks like this one has measured in at a whopping 8.5 feet. It doesn't take a soil scientist to know how to document this. But say we wanted to measure something else, something that requires length and width. Hmm...

(Describer) A graph, a pie chart, and a duck are shown.

(duck) Quack!

(narrator) Ah, there. That should do-- a nice, big field 10 meters wide and 8 meters long. Well, we know how to measure the width and length. Now the trick is putting these measurements together. This is where the second dimension comes into play. By multiplying the width and length, we get the area, which represents the two-dimensional space the field occupies. If we say, "The field has an area of 80 meters," our statement is false since 80 meters is a measure of length, which is one-dimensional. So, instead we say, "The field has an area of 80 meters squared," since we must use square units for measurement in the second dimension. When writing this out, we use one of these little guys, a superscripted 2, or exponent, which we call a square. It's rather fitting, isn't it? When you see this 2, you know you are dealing with the second dimension. "What about the third dimension?" you ask. Ah, yes, I did mention that earlier, didn't I? With the third dimension, we must add a third parameter. So, let's take our field here and...pull it up. Now that we are no longer dealing with a flat, two-dimensional field, we have another measurement to take, the height, or depth. We know that our length, also known as the base, is 10 meters; and our width is 8 meters, just like before; and now we see our height is 5 meters. We will lay out this equation, base times width times height. But we are no longer determining the area since area is a two-dimensional aspect. Instead, we have calculated the volume. There we have it-- 400 meters cubed. We use "cubed" instead of "squared" since cubed units are used to measure the volume of three-dimensional objects. And that is how we measure things in the three-dimensional world. This simple concept can be applied to many different forms of measurement, both metric and standard. Uck! But don't get me started on standard. The importance of dimensional documentation is never more evident than when it is done improperly. For example, say you wanted five square meters of sod delivered to a site. Now, let's see what happens when we change this little digit. That's different, isn't it?

(Describer) The sod becomes flat.

Let's see what happens if we adjust the other way.

(Describer) The enormous 3D sod smashes a truck.

[crash!]

Who would have thought that this one little number could be the difference between 50 pounds of sod and 47,000 pounds of sod? It's important to keep track of all your numbers. Even the itty-bitty ones can cause big, big problems.

(Describer) A hubcap from the smashed truck rolls over to the girl in glasses. She wears a concerned look.

Accessibility provided by the U.S. Department of Education.

(Describer) Titles. Executive producer Dr Jeanne Gleason, EdD. Project directors Dr. Barbara Chamberlin PhD, Dr. April Ulrey, PhD, Dr. Jeanne Gleason EdD. Production managers Elizabeth Sohn. Seth Powers. Voice narration Eric Young. NM State University Learning Games Lab. USDA. Accessibility provided by the US Department of Education.

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