The cube is a six-sided geometric solid used in math and architecture. Its volume is found by multiplying length, width, and height, and it is associated with ice cubes and cutting food into cubes in cooking. It is also used to tenderize meat and refers to a module in an open-plan office and a plant used as fish poison.
The cube is important as a geometric shape used in mathematical demonstrations, architecture, and other mathematically related areas; as well as in the kitchen and beyond. Here are some of the important meanings of this shape.
Like a geometric solid. A regular hexahedron, the cube is a six-sided geometric solid, also called a block. It is one of the ideal solids, which include the only five solids with congruent polyhedral angles and faces that are congruent regular polygons. The others are the regular tetrahedron, the regular octahedron, the regular dodecahedron and the regular icosahedron, having respectively 4, 8, 12 and 20 sides. The cube is the only one of these five to have four edges per face: the tetrahedron, the octahedron and the icosahedron – formed with equilateral triangular faces – have three; and the dodecahedron — formed with regular pentagon faces — has five.
Since the volume of a cube is found by multiplying the length by the width by the height, and since these measurements are all equal, V = s3 when s is the length of any side. Consequently, the product of three equal terms is called the cube of the term. The factor of a number which, when cubed, equals the number is called the cube root, and the action of creating the number from the factor is denoted by the verb cubed.
The culinary arts. The word is associated with the culinary arts in three ways. Primarily, it is used as a shorthand way to refer to ice cube, a small block of ice in approximately this shape. One of the main ways to judge ice makers is the cubes/x minutes statistic, for which this abbreviation is often used.
Secondly, the verb to dice in cooking is equivalent to dice, which means “to cut food into cubes”. This culinary technique is used to cut fruits and vegetables to a certain size. To put it in perspective: chop is used to indicate that large uneven chunks should be obtained; the mince produces very small but irregular pieces; while cube or dice produce medium sized and regular pieces of food. Diced food is 0.25 inch to 0.75 inch (~6 mm to ~19 mm) thick on each side.
Third, the verb cube names a technique used to tenderize meat, often beef. To do this, a meat tenderizer is used, one version of which is a metal cube covered with a square pattern on a hammer-like handle. By repeatedly hitting the meat with the tenderizer, the fibers break down and a pattern of squares emerges on the surface.
Other meanings. This word is also used to refer to several things. It’s short for cubicle, a module in an open-plan office or study area in a library, where partitions, rather than walls, separate workspaces. Cube, or – as it was originally rendered in Spanish – cubé, is a plant whose roots are used as fish poison and commercially developed with other ingredients such as the pesticide rotenone. It was also the name of a 20-inch (~4 cm) G8 computer sold by Apple Computers.
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