Read this next paragraph and see how it makes you feel:

Those are useful numbers, but they don't really mean much by themselves. They don't give you a picture of the sizes of the Earth and Moon and the distance between them.

This is where models come in handy. Making a scale model of Earth and the Moon will teach you a lot about them.

Choose a Scale Size for your Earth-Moon Model

A model's "scale" is the difference between the real thing you're making a model of and the model itself. For the model to be useful, you must first choose a scale that you can comfortably work with.

For most people, models are most useful when they have been scaled to a size that lets them hold it, walk around it, and study it from a number of angles.

The globe you used previously to look at Greenland and Iceland was probably was about as big, or a little bigger than, the size of a basketball.

Just to keep things simple, let's set the scale of our Earth-Moon model so that the Earth is as big as a basketball.

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