Lizzie Goes To The Land of Math
Once upon a time there was a beautiful, tall and athletic girl named Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s closest friends called her Lizzie. Lizzie was a stubborn young lady, she never listened and always got her way. She knew she was good at the sports she played and she never worked hard in school.
"I’m going to be an athlete," She would say, "I don’t need to worry about school, I’m going to be a professional basketball player when I grow up."
Lizzie’s parents spoiled her rotten, she did only what she wanted and she never took interest in school, math, science or anything boring like that. Until one day, Lizzie was in her closet looking at her large assortment of her endless supply of clothes and trophies when she noticed a noise coming from the back of her closet. She looked under a pile of clothes and saw a bright light shining from a hole deep in the floor. Curious, she reached to get a better look but slipped and fell right in.
What seemed like a few minutes later, Lizzie woke up to a small fuzzy animal hovering over her. Seeing her wake up, the creature smiled and offered it’s hand to help her up. Looking around in awe, Lizzie saw a world like nothing she had seen before. Clouds formed equations, trees had numbers hanging from them in place of apples, odd animals walked around murmuring long strings of numbers to themselves. She backed up and felt something hard hit her back, she turned around and saw a large sign with neatly printed words: Welcome to the Land of Math.
Land of math? Lizzie thought, oh no, how could I manage to get myself into this? I need to get out of here. Land of math? That’s soo boring!
The little creature introduced himself as Deetree and asked Lizzie if she was hungry. Realizing she was actually quite starving, she accepted the offer but told herself she would find her way home immediately after.
After eating, Lizzie was explaining that she had to go, when a few creatures came walking by. They saw Deetree and explained they were going to play basketball and asked if Lizzie and Deetree wanted to play. Lizzie said she would, but right after she was going home. On the way to playing basketball she thought to herself why they would be playing basketball in the Land of math when sports had nothing to do with math.
Lizzie laughed to herself when she got on the court, she had only then realized how small all the creatures were. Maybe she would take it easy on them, after all, look at how short they were. But when they started to play, Lizzie was amazed by how good they were. At the end of the game, after beating Lizzie by quite a bit, Lizzie couldn’t help but ask how they were able to play so well. They explained how basketball was a game of planes, angles and parabolas. They told her how the basketball court was all geometrical as well as the backboard on the basketball net, and how using angles to pick a precise angle on the backboard, you can get the ball in every time or how standing metres away from the net, you use parabolas to precisely measure and get a perfect shot.
They gave her tips on where and where not to shoot the ball, they told her how the area and perimeter of a backboard is 24inches.2-28inches and using that you can make your measurements to get a perfect and almost guaranteed shot every time. They showed her how to use math to better improve her game. They talked, and Lizzie learned until the sun started to set. Lizzie realized she had to get home before her parents started wondering where she was and she had a game soon. When Lizzie got home that night she played her game better then she ever thought she could. Everyone was shocked that Lizzie could possibly play better then she already had. Curious now about how math helped in sports, Lizzie tried math in all sorts of things she did in her everyday life, and realized just how much she was missing out on without math.