Observations and results
Was the actual volume of juice in some juice boxes much closer to the calculated volume than when compared with other boxes? Did some boxes have a much smaller surface-area-to-volume ratio than others?

As you probably saw from this activity, different juice boxes that hold the same amount of juice can have very different dimensions. This can change their surface areas and the total volumes that they can hold. The actual volume of juice held by many juice boxes takes up over 95 percent of the total calculated volume of the box, although some boxes may hold juice that takes up less of the total calculated volume than this. The surface-area-to-juice-volume ratio is usually a little over 1, often around 1.2 to 1.3. This means that there is a little more packaging used per volume of juice. The higher the ratio, the more packaging is used per volume of juice.

More to explore
"Rectangular Prism Calculator” from Calculator Soup
“Cool Math 4 Kids” from Coolmath.com
“Juice Box Geometry” from Science Buddies


This activity brought to you in partnership with Science Buddies

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