Review by Booklist Review
Ages 5^-9. Schwartz, the author of How Much Is a Million? (1985), tackles ratio and proportion and once again shows the same knack for wowing his audience with plain facts stated in startling ways. Here he uses images from the animal kingdom to dramatize ideas of proportion: "If you were as strong as an ANT . . . you could lift a car!" and "If you high-jumped like a FLEA . . . you could land on Lady Liberty's torch!" Warhola's pleasing, colorful paintings make the most of the visual humor inherent in the images. Although the main text is quite short, the last few pages discuss each marvel in more detail and show the ratio used to calculate it. Instantly appealing, this picture book makes its subject accessible by taking the fear out of it. A welcome addition to classroom units on proportion. --Carolyn Phelan
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this high-spirited book, Schwartz does for ratio and proportion what he did for numbers in How Much Is a Million? The author, in an opening letter to readers, admits his secret childhood wish: that he could "hop like a frog," which leads to its corollaryÄ"Once you know that a frog can jump twenty times its body length, you can figure out how far you could hop if you hopped like a frog." Schwartz continues to extrapolate such kinds of information into fun-filled comparisons: "If you ate like a shrew, you could devour over 700 hamburgers in a day!" Warhola (Bigfoot Cinderrrrrella) matches the text with wit and whimsy, as he imagines what would happen if children grew as fast in their first nine months after birth as they do during pregnancy: a gigantic baby tips an enormous seesaw that uses a mountaintop for a fulcrum and raises a mound of 2.5 million elephants at the other end. Author and artist wisely let the dramatic facts speak for themselves, with just a bit of a wink: "If you flicked your tongue like a chameleon... you could whip the food off your plate without using your hands! But what would your mother say?" The book concludes with straightforward mathematical and zoological explanations for each vignette, then invites readers to undertake some simple and amusing equations of their own. Trivia fans and aspiring scientists alike will revel in these pages. Ages 5-9. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Gr 1-3-This picture book invites children to learn about some of the amazing things that animals can do. For example, "If you ate like a SHREW...you could devour over 700 hamburgers in a day!" These tidbits of information are accompanied by cartoonlike illustrations that add to the fun of imagining what readers could do if they had the physical characteristics of different creatures. While this is an amusing, although simplistic picture book, the author's note presents it as a math concept book intended to introduce children to the concepts of ratio and proportion. Thus, children learn that the ant is "lifting 50 times its own weight." Kids are then challenged to use their own weight to figure out what they could lift if they had similar strength. However, the math portion is relegated to a few pages of small print at the end of the book, where readers are much less likely to pay attention to it. It will take an enterprising teacher or parent to extract the intended math lesson. Nevertheless, youngsters will enjoy the humor of both the text and the full-color illustrations.-Arwen Marshall, New York Public Library (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
A lighthearted look at ratio and proportion as it applies to the animal world reveals that a kid with the strength of an ant could lift a car over her head, and a kid who could eat like a shrew could pack away seven hundred plus hamburgers each day. Playful illustrations show what such feats might look like, while an afterword explains the nitty-gritty of the math. From HORN BOOK Spring 2000, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
