Food for thought, a set of questions designed to exercise your understanding or enlarge your knowledge of the book chapters. After reading each chapter, do the chapter Quick Quiz. Then to probe further, consider the following.

Chapter 1. Imagine that you have a younger sister who has decided to enter a postsecondary institution in Canada. Make a list of the following with reasons both for and against her entering into an undergraduate engineering program.

Chapter 2. How many licensing Associations for engineering are there in Canada? Why are there that many and not one single organization? What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages for the public and for practicing engineers of having more than one Association? Hint: The answer to the second question should have the number 1867 in it.

Chapter 3. Someone once said that specialized knowledge with a code of ethics is a profession and without a code of ethics, it is a vocation. Why should a profession have a code of ethics to govern the conduct of its members? To help you answer, you might wish to look at the web sites of the association in your province.

Chapter 4. In the lists of engineering societies in Chapter 4, find at least one Canadian society and one international society of relevance to your proposed field of study. Look at their web sites. Do they have a student membership category? Would you benefit from joining as a student member?

Chapter 5. The hints for success as a student discussed in Chapter 5 boil down to two principles: take an active part in learning the required material, and take control of your timetable. A useful exercise to determine how well you have taken control is to list yourself and three friends in your program of studies. Make a table that rates each person according to how well the 10-point checklist of Section 5.6 is followed. Rate each person according to your perception of their likelihood to succeed as a student. Your table may provide revealing comparisons.

Chapter 6. What are the principal characteristics that distinguish an engineering document from a normal business document? Name three documents that would be found in an engineering firm or department that would not normally be found in an accounting firm or department.

Chapter 7. Take the test in Question 2 at the end of Chapter 7. Do you need assistance to improve your English? If you judge your writing skills to be adequate, will you need to keep a dictionary, thesaurus, or other writing aids handy during your career? Can writing skills be compared to athletic skills and do both require regular practice in order to maintain top performance?

Chapter 8. What is the first thing you should do before beginning to write an engineering report? Putting yourself in the place of the report reader, what question should you imagine asking about every conclusion in the report? Chapter 9. If it is true that producing good graphics is an art as well as a craft, then a graphic can almost always be improved. Examine Figures 9.1, 9.5, and 9.9 with a critical eye and list at least three ways that each figure can be improved. Figure 9.1 is very well known, having been cited by Tufte (see reference [4]) as “Probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn,” and contests have been held to see if it can be improved. Compare your suggested improvements with those that you can find by web search.

Chapter 10. Compared to the current calendar and clock, what would be the advantages and disadvantages of a month divided into three 10-day intervals, with 10 hours of 100 minutes in each day, as mentioned in Section 10.2?

Chapter 11. A measured quantity has been recorded completely when a certain statement has been made about the measurement. What is that statement and what are the components associated with the statement?

Chapter 12. Knowing two angles and the length of one side allows the calculation of all properties of a triangle. Suppose that you wish to calculate the width of a river by measuring a straight line along one bank and the angles between the line and the sight lines to a tree on the opposite bank at each end of the line. Suppose that the precision of each of the three measurements is fixed, but that the precision of the calculated width of the river is to be maximized. Does the length and position of the line along the bank make a difference? Can you calculate the length that gives the most precise calculation?

Chapter 13. For the paper clip fatigue to failure data given in Table 13.3, calculate the mean, variance, and standard deviation using a computer spreadsheet program.

Chapter 14. Suppose that you are conducting a poll to predict the winner of the next national election, in which only two parties, A and B, are running. You interview N people and ask who they will vote for. Each of these “measurements” has only two possible outcomes, and each one may be 100% incorrect. You calculate the percentage of the N interviewees that will vote for party A and use this to predict the outcome of the election. The more people you interview, the better will be your prediction. To have an expected precision within plus or minus 3% 19 times out of 20, how large should N be?

Chapter 15. You work for a large company that wishes to encourage creativity by allowing groups of employees to work together developing new products by imagining that each group is an independent small company. The large company has to monitor progress in order to control costs. How would you structure such a group, and in order to satisfy the large company with the least amount of effort, what documents would you write?

Chapter 16. Imagine that between your third and fourth year of studies, you and two other engineering undergraduates are going to start a small company. Comparing your skills with those mentioned in Chapter 16, list the principal skills that your partners should ideally possess, and outline on one sheet of paper a draft of your business plan. Chapter 17. Should an engineering undergraduate have basic knowledge of the different forms of intellectual property? Does the law affect your life as a student? A professor and several students worked on a project to measure the properties of a rubber compound. The professor wrote a scholarly article listing the measured values in a table. Who has copyright on the table? Does the copyright law require the author of the article to acknowledge the co-workers of the author in the article? Do professional ethics require it? Because of a personal disagreement, one of the students quit the project and wrote to the others forbidding them to use the data collected by the student. Does either the law or professional ethics allow the student to prevent use of the data?

Chapter 18. The CPM described in Chapter 18 can be implemented by computer. Do you know of any programs that perform the calculations and produce Gantt charts of the result? You may have to do a Web search to find some possibilities.

Chapter 19. Engineers are responsible for the safety of those who use or construct their designs, but absolute safety can never be guaranteed. Name three things that an engineer can do to reduce the likelihood that dangerous hazards are present.

Chapter 20. Is fault-tree analysis a top-down method or a bottom-up method for evaluating system risk? What about FMEA analysis?