With a wooden ruler, you measure the length of a rectangular piece of sheet metal to be 12 mm. With micrometer calipers, you measure the width of the rectangle to be 5.98 mm. Use the correct number of significant figures: What is the perimeter of the rectangle?

Bacteria vary in size, but a diameter of 2.0 μm is not unusual. What are the volume (in cubic centimeters) and surface area (in square millimeters) of a spherical bacterium of that size?

With a wooden ruler, you measure the length of a rectangular piece of sheet metal to be 12 mm. With micrometer calipers, you measure the width of the rectangle to be 5.98 mm. Use the correct number of significant figures: What is the area of the rectangle?

How many gallons of gasoline are used in the United States in one day? Assume that there are two cars for every three people, that each car is driven an average of 10,000 miles per year, and that the average car gets 20 miles per gallon.

A useful and easy-to-remember approximate value for the number of seconds in a year is π × 107. Determine the percent error in this approximate value. (There are 365.24 days in one year.)

In the fall of 2002, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory determined that the critical mass of neptunium-237 is about 60 kg. The critical mass of a fissionable material is the minimum amount that must be brought together to start a nuclear chain reaction. Neptunium-237 has a density of 19.5 g/cm3. What would be the radius of a sphere of this material that has a critical mass?

Four astronauts are in a spherical space station. If, as is typical, each of them breathes about 500 cm³ of air with each breath, approximately what volume of air (in cubic meters) do these astronauts breathe in a year?