Introduction

Crop Circles are unexplained designs that are imprinted over the span of usually one night in fields of mostly wheat & corn, but have also occurred in barley, oats, rape (canola), grass, trees, and even snow. In other words, any organic material in which a distinguishable impression can be made. They occur in crops during the spring & summer seasons throughout various regions of the world, such as in the U.S., Canada, throughout Europe, South America, Asia and Australia. Some people believe that they are created by alien visitors and others are convinced that they are all done by hoaxsters.

You have been hired by CCCS (the Centre for Crop Circle Studies) to write computer programs to help them explore and analyze the data they have been collecting on crop circles. As your first task, you are to write a simple program to look at various geometric data on the simplest of circles.

The task

Your program should read in data from the user for a crop circle and print your analysis. For each crop circle, prompt the user for the following data:

an integer representing the "file number" for the siting
a character string representing the name assigned to the siting
an integer representing the radius of the circle in meters.
an integer representing the circle's elevation above sea level in meters

Your program should then print a table which shows the following floating point data expressed in meters, inches and feet: the circle's radius, circumference and area, and also the volume of a sphere of that radius. In addition, print the ratios of the circle's radius, area and volume to its elevation. An example of your program in action might look like the following. We've shown the user's input in italic font .


  % ccat

  Welcome to the CCCS Circle Analysis Tool
  file number?  3152 
  description?  Catonsville 9-9-96 
  radius in meters? RR
  elevation in meters  EEE 


  Catonsville 9-9-96 (#3152) radius=RR, elev=EEE

                  meters  inches      feet
                 ---------------------------
  radius          RR.0    XYZ.ZY      XY.ZZY
  elevation       LLL     MMMMM       NNNN
  circumference   XXX     YYY         ZZZ
  area            AAAA    BBBB        CCCC
  volume          DDDD    EEEE        FFFF

  RATIOS:
    radius/elevation   GGG.GG
    area/elevation     HHH.H
    volume/elevation   III.I

The output of your program does not have to follow this example exactly, but it should be reasonable close. We will leave it up to you to remember the required formulae and chose appropriate estimates for Pi and the conversion factors between the metric and English measures. You can assume that data entered by the user are reasonable (e.g., no negative radii). Consult the 201 Suggested Coding Standards for recommendations on the form of your program.

When and what to submit

The project should be submitted electronically by midnight, Wednesday, September 25th. The details of how to do this will be provided next week. In no case will we accept alien abduction as an excuse for late submissions.

Some final advice

The truth is out there. Trust no one.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Thursday, 12-Sep-1996 15:11:08 EDT