TeaPrime Minister, Rishi Sunak has proposed that school students should continue to learn maths up to 18 To acquire the numeracy skills needed in careers and everyday adult life. This proposition may be useful for current teens – but what about those of us who have already begun to grapple with adult life, and may feel anxious every time we encounter the numbers?
millions of adults in Britain struggling with basic arithmetic, Many people suffer from genuine phobias – math anxiety – of numbers, calculations and even the word “math”.
There are many occasions in our daily life where knowing some maths can be helpful in making good decisions. Here are some examples to get you started using maths more confidently.
1. Use Ratios to Adapt a Recipe
You’ve found a great recipe in a cookbook you want to try — but the recipe serves four, and you’re only cooking for three and don’t want to use extra ingredients. Ratio can help you work it out. It means to divide something into parts. Where the recipe calls for four parts of something, you only need three. Mathematically, you can say that what you need compared to the recipe is at a 3:4 ratio. Or, you can use the fraction ¾; The math to solve it is the same.
If a recipe calls for 120 grams of dough, you know it serves four. To find one part, divide 120 by four. Use a calculator – no problem. One portion is 30 grams of flour. Then multiply by the three people you’re cooking for. This gives you 90 grams of flour for your recipe.
If the recipe says six tablespoons of oil, how much oil will you need? Divide this by four, which gives you one and a half.
Then you’ll need three heaping tablespoons – that’s four and a half tablespoons of oil for your recipe.
2. Understand the Averages to See Whether You Need a Pay Raise
The median annual earnings of people working full time in the UK in 2021 was £38,131, How do we understand the meaning of this number?
There are different ways to calculate the average. In this case, the figure is a type of average known as the mean. It was calculated by adding up the earnings of all people working full time and then dividing that large number by the number of people. But that doesn’t really tell us how common it is to earn this amount.
This number can be reached if most people earn around £38,131. But even this can be reached if only a few people have earned a lot and the rest have earned very little. It could mean the same thing.
Another way to understand the mean is to use the median. This essentially means lining up everyone from the lowest earner to the highest earner and picking the middle one. His earning will be average. It’s more meaningful, because it means that some people earn much more than others, not skewing the average. This is the notion used by the Office for National Statistics to talk about “average yield”,
Average earnings for full-time employees in the UK in 2021 were £31,285. If you earn much less than the average salary for your industry, that doesn’t necessarily tell you a big deal, as CEO earnings can also be included in this. But if you earn much less than the median, it might be worth finding out why.
3. Use Mental Segmentation in a Restaurant
Having a calculator on our phones can make splitting the bill at a restaurant easier, and there’s no shame in using it. But sometimes it can happen that your phone gets lost under the bag, or the battery runs out. Being able to do math in your head is a great skill.
The best way to do quick division is to develop your own methods to make it easier. This may involve rounding up or down to a number that is easier to divide by the number of people in your table.
Imagine you have to split a £92 bill between four people: 92 is almost 100, and we know that 100 divided by four is 25. £8 divided by four people is £2 less per person. So each person’s bill is £25 minus £2 – £23 each.
Another person may prefer to round £92 to another number that is easier to divide by four: £80. This makes £20 each. There is a total of £12 left to split between the four. This means an extra £3 for each, so £23 for each.
carve out a path to hike
Perhaps you’re planning a trip with some friends, and it involves sightseeing through the city or a hike in the countryside. You want to plan a route that suits everyone and doesn’t leave you stranded and far from your destination when it gets dark. Maths can help you.
More than a century ago, a Scottish mountaineer devised a formula called Naismith’s law, It states that when planning a route, allow one hour for every 5 km (three miles) of walking, and ten for every 100 meters (300 ft) of ascent if you are going uphill. add min. So if your planned route is a 15 km hike with 600 meters of ascent, it will take you three hours plus an additional hour: four hours in total.
Once you’ve mastered that, another mathematical skill can be useful: estimation. Your walk may be more of a jog – so add some time. You’re about to stop for lunch, so an hour to eat. You can give yourself about six hours to complete your walk, and now might be a good time to start.
Maths is there to help you. with the right mindset, everyone can learn math,
david penazziSenior Lecturer in Mathematics, University of Central Lancashire
This article is republished from Conversation Under Creative Commons Licence. read the original article,
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