Volume of Spheres Examples

The diameter of this sphere is 11.9 cm, so the radius is half of that, 5.95 cm.

You cut an orange in half and measure the radius to be 1.5 in. What is the volume of the orange half?

The radius of this sphere is 1.5 in. So the volume of the whole orange is:

However, we only need the volume of half of the orange, so if we divide it in two, we get our answer:

A basketball has a diameter of 9 inches. What is the volume?

The formula for the volume of a sphere is 4/3πr³ so we need to figure out the radius of the basketball first.

The radius is half of the diameter, so the radius is 4.5 inches.

Plugging that into the formula, we get 4/3(3.14)(4.5)² = 4/3 (63.585) = 84.78 in³.