About us!

We are Amisadai and Louisa Monger (aged 15 and 13). In 2010, we moved to Tanzania in Africa - look at the map below to see if you can find it! We hope you will enjoy reading about our adventures and looking at our photos! Please don't forget to send us a message too!



Tuesday 2 April 2013

How Do We Get Coffee? And Coffee Maths!


Masumbo Coffee Field Trip

While Dad was away in Mwanza, Louisa and I went with Mum on a fun coffee expedition to Masumbo, where our friends, the Moyers, grow their coffee. David showed us all around and explained everything about growing coffee. He even let us eat a coffee cherry! It didn't taste very nice. Inside (in a slimy coat) there were two coffee beans, which we had to spit out! Louisa has made a slide show (with some extra help at the end) which will tell you all about coffee and how it is grown and processed.



Learning about coffee with David
Louisa with a coffee cherry in her mouth!

And here is Louisa's Coffee Presentation ...


Here are some tricky problems for you to solve.

You get 4kg of coffee cherries from one coffee bush. David has 4500 bushes, so how many kilograms of cherries does he harvest?

You get 1kg of green coffee beans from 7kg of cherries. So how many kilograms of green coffee beans can you get from 1 bush? How much will David get from all his bushes?

The ratio of green coffee to roast coffee is 1:0.88. So how much actual roasted coffee comes from 1 bush? How much does David get from all of his bushes?

You can plant about 2200 bushes on a hectare of land. About many cherries can you get per hectare? How much roasted coffee can you get per hectare?

When you roast the green beans you lose 12-20% weight, but the volume increases by 50 -80%. Can you make up a problem with these facts?

First prize to the first person to send in all the right answers! I couldn't get them all!

The Coffee Machines

To help David, we thought we would invent a machine that could do all the steps for him. Here are our blueprints!


Some Other News ... Pigs!

Two weeks ago, we got two pigs! Mummy was really excited and so was I. We got one boy and one girl. We have called them Peppa and Percy. We got them in Magozi from Marco. They are four months old, now nearly five months. We are really enjoying having them!

... Eye problems

Louisa has been having eye problems. She says that everything suddenly goes all tiny. We have noticed how her pupils go very large. We found her trying to put a glue stick in her mouth sideways! So she went to Dar with dad, to get it checked out but the eye doctor said he didn't know what it was and couldn't find anything wrong with her eyes. Esther Shaw's sister who is an eye doctor, says she has seen it before and can help. So Louisa will go back with dad in two weeks.

3 comments:

  1. That's a great way to get somebody else to do your math homework for you!I'm not very good at answers but I'm good at making up problems. So:if I roast green beans I lose about 15% of my weight because I sweat so much, but how much bigger is my waist if when I drink all the coffee my volume increases by 50%? Lol Papaxxx

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  2. OK - I had some coffee, so I'm fired up to do some math. Here are my answers:
    1. 18,000 kg
    2. a) .57 kg b) 2571 kg
    3. a) .50 kg b) 2250 kg
    4. a) 8800 cherries b) 1100 kg
    5. If Percy the pig ate one of David's bushes (that had .50 kg of green coffee beans)just before Percy was slaughtered and roasted, and if Percy weighed 100 kg before he had his breakfast, how much lighter was he after he had been roasted? Does that matter if he increased in volume so you could get more pork chops out of him?
    Lol Papaxxx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. David harvests 18,000 kg cherries
      1 bush gives 0.571428 kg green beans
      Davids bushes give 2571.428569 kg green beans
      1 bush gives 0.50285714 kg roast beans
      David's bushes give 2262.85713 kg roast beans
      1 hectare gives 8800 kg cherries
      1 hectare gives 1106.28571 kg roast beans

      If David roasts all his green beans, what is the most weight he is likely to lose?

      Delete