Chris Becher, age 8, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for his question:

How do you measure a cord of wood?

The cord unit is used to measure the pile of logs we buy to burn in our grates. The notion of measuring a pile of wood seems hard and perhaps you would not know how to begin. A simple way is to think of bulk or volume, which is the amount of space filled by so many logs. The measuring unit of such volumes is the cubic foot. It is a boxy square, one foot wide, one foot long and one foot high. In a cord of wood, there are enough logs to fill 128 cubic feet of space.

This pile of logs may fill a square area on the ground, two feet high and eight feet along each side. You can shape it into a higher pile, but the sides will be shorter. If you make the sides of the boxy square four feet long, then the top of the cord of logs would stand eight feet above the ground. You can build 128 cubic feet of logs into many other shapes also. A cord of wood is a lot of logs, but people needed dots of wood for their olden style furnaces. Nowadays, we often buy logs in smaller units.