The Icebox (Ⅱ)

6 The Icebox (II) Our icebox was finally sitting on the table waiting for the glue to dry, with a slanted bottom and cracks between every ridge. At that moment, Vlad and I sincerely thanked the teacher for not evaluating the cool box on its appearance. The first test of the icebox was extremely disappointing. Since this was our first experiment, we both wanted good results to boost our confidence. Before I went to bed that night, I carefully picked out a huge block of ice from our refrigerator and placed it inside the icebox. When I woke up unusually early the next morning and looked into the icebox, there wasn't even a speck of ice left. Even the melted water had leaked through the cracked edges! " What do you think?" I asked Vlad. " Let's start again, " he said, shaking his head. Reflecting on this failure, we were determined to find a better insulating material than air. After stuffing the inside of the big box with fibreglass, we tried the same experiment again.

" How did we do this time?" asked Vlad over the phone. “ Seventy percent! " I exclaimed. “ Nice! " The day of the competition came very fast. We all brought our masterpieces into the classroom. Virtually every team had a different design-from boxes made of different materials to boxes that operated in different ways. One fellow even attached a motor to his icebox and turned it into a refrigerator. Putting all the iceboxes side by side on the table, we left for home, hoping that we would win. The next day, everybody rushed towards these works of art, hoping that there would still be morsels of ice left. Some kids searched and searched, and were even about to tear their iceboxes apart, but couldn't find anything. Luckily, it turned out that we didn't do too badly. Having almost 60 percent of the ice cube still remaining, we had an above average result! The winner of the competition, however, was the guy who made a motorized refrigerator. When we opened his icebox, he had a piece of ice that was 140 percent the size of the original! His innovative design was definitely a cut above the rest.