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Shearing box is a technique for a three dimensional model of accretion disks (and perhaps other disks) when it has enough of a magnetic field that magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) is needed for an adequate model, in particular, for modeling magnetorotational instability (MRI). The technique is to model one section of the disk (considering the disk as concentric rings, and taking some length of one such ring) specifically including the third (z) dimension, aiming for a model that is typical of any such section of the whole disk. It uses MHD equations that ignore the curvature of such a portion of the disk, treating it as rectangular (but including terms for centrifugal and Coriolis force), a simplification analogous to a plane-parallel atmosphere model.