Take a moment to reflect to determine how you might have use

Take a moment to reflect to determine how you might have used ratios, rates, and proportions in your everyday life. If you are stumped about how these mathematical instruments are used every day think about the last time you doubled a recipe or reduced/enlarged a digital picture.

Solution

Ratios are very important and widely used in everyday life. Ratios help us to compare one thing to another. For example, compairing 5 bananas to 1 banana (5:1). These comparisons allow us to make judgements and choose more wisely. For example, what kind of offer would you prefer, an offer where you buy 3 objects get 1 object free (Ratio being 3:1) or buy 4 objects get 2 objects free (Ratio being 4:2)? This seems easy when we reduce each of the ratios to a unit cost to compare. The offer where you buy 4 objects and get 2 objects free reduces to (2:1), clearly a better deal. Ratios become easy to deal with when we have same denominator. So now we can see that buying two objects and getting one is a better deal.

Likewise, rates help us determine which object will be cheaper to buy. For example, say one shopper sells apples at $15 per kilogram and another shopper sells apples at $ 28 per 2 kilogram. Therefore, we convert the rate per kilogram, and we get $14 per kilogram. Hence buying apples from second shopper is cheaper.