Why is maths important and how does it affect our life everyday?
Every year I get students telling me “I hate maths, why do I have to learn it if I know I am not going to use it after exams?"
Well, Maths is crucial! It is all around us in the real world. There will never be a day when you will not use maths in one way or another.
Here are few examples to illustrate the point:
1. Cooking
When cooking, you may need to halve or double ingredients for your recipe. Most adult can do this “by eye”, but it is a sound mathematical understanding which allows us to achieve this. I.e. if 4 and ½ tbsp. of coco power is needed to make 2 chocolate brownie, then how much will be needed to make 6 brownies?
2. Shopping
When out Shopping, you will to be able to identify the best bargains on offer giving you best value for money. You may find that pack of 4 tins of sweetcorn are cheaper to buy than 3 individual tins, here your maths skills and abilities have saved you few pennies.
3. Time
When planning a journey to and from, you may need to calculate and estimate the time it will take you to be somewhere. Here time telling skills are used. There are a lot of things you need to understand, all at once, in order to know how to tell time. For example, you need to be aware that there are 24 hours in a day, that each day is then split into two 12-hour halves, that each hour lasts 60 minutes, and that each minute is 60 seconds-long... plus 60 isn't the easiest number to work with!
Don’t you just hate it when you read a film is 93 minutes long and you have to try to work out in your head what this equates to in hours and minutes?
Fractions also come into play, when we say its “a quarter to six”. We’re actually telling them that a quarter of an hour remains until it becomes six o’clock.
4. Measurements
You may need to work out how many litres of paint you will need to paint the walls of your kitchen. Here you will need to measure the lengths of wall and calculate how many square meters of wall can be painted in one tin of paint. This is useful as paint tins can be expensive and you do not want to add extra cost.
5. Mortgage, open saving accounts, interest rates
Buying property is among the most significant and practical examples of using maths in your everyday life. In fact, when you borrow money, you are offered a repayment plan that accounts for interest rates for 2, 10, 25 or 30 years. To know how much, you're going to pay overall, what you need to save and what you have to repay, interest rate calculations prove to very important.
6. Fitness and calories
Nutrition support plans are full of abbreviations for standard and metric units. Grams, milligrams, percentages, amounts per servings, serving size are just a few things to be able to understand. Being able to convert units from one to another makes a great difference.
7. Travel
Nowadays, GPS receivers are found in so many cars and smartphones. There, too, maths is at work! Before all this technology came along, we had the compass, protractor, sextant and the astrolabe: It's with triangulation that we can determine our distance from a fixed point, and direction of movement.
It is required everywhere, every day and every time....
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