Take A Walk When was the last time you took a nice long walk These days walking is generally thought of as a form of recreation or exercise But actually walking is the most basic form of transportation people have In fact walking is the one form of transportation a person can take advantage of without needing any other equipment 6
Stride length varies from person to person One way to measure your exact stride length is to set a distance 10 feet 3 meters for instance and see how many steps it takes you to walk that length Walking is no longer considered a serious form of transportation simply because we have many other far more efficient ways to travel from one place to another Cars trains and planes are all faster than walking This has probably raised an interesting question in your mind Just how fast is walking The first thing to do would be to find out how many steps you take in one minute You will need to use a stopwatch or some other form of timer to do this 7
Using this information can you calculate how long it would take you to walk one mile The mile is the basis of length in the U S Customary System of measurement also known as the Imperial System of measurement STEM in Action Let’s say that you took 60 steps in one minute What this means will become clearer when you multiply 60 by 2 The 2 stands for two feet This is the average stride length or the distance a person covers with a single step 60 x 2 120 Now you know that in one minute you walk a distance of roughly 120 feet One mile is equal to roughly 5,280 feet If you walk at a pace of about 120 feet per minute you can find out how long it would take you to travel a mile by using division 5,280 120 44 So to walk a distance of one mile it would take you about 44 minutes What if your destination the place you have to go is 20 miles away How long would it take you to get there by walking You can find out by multiplying the time it takes to travel one mile by the number of miles 20 x 44 880 It would take about 880 minutes to travel a distance of 20 miles on foot To convert that number to hours you can divide it by 60 which is the number of minutes in one hour 880 60 14 6 Wow To walk a distance of 20 miles would take about 15 hours 8
When you realize the length of time it takes to walk one mile it makes sense that people worked to develop easier more efficient forms of travel The relatively slow speed of walking led to the invention of the form of transport you are probably most familiar with the automobile Did You Know The Pedometer For the most accurate measure of your walking speed you would need to use a pedometer A pedometer is actually a combination of two devices a pendulum and a calculator The pendulum swings each time it feels the vibrations from your feet hitting the ground Meanwhile the calculator divides the number of steps you take by 5,280 the number of feet in one mile Because a pedometer depends on vibrations to count your steps it is not good for measuring distances covered by activities that do not involve impact like bike riding 9
