Question

If one of the criteria for your design is a five-gauss exclusion zone, what type of space are you likely to be designing?

Answer

You are most likely designing a hospital or clinic space for a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. The magnet at the core of the scanner can cause damage to property and severe injury to anyone with a pacemaker or ferrous implant, or even to someone carrying loose objects containing iron. A gauss, by the way, is the centimeter-gram-second unit of magnetic induction named after the German mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss. Creating an exclusion zone through magnetic shielding requires the installation of tons of steel plating.