How can you use rates and ratios in real life situations?

Answer 1

For rate, an example would be a car moving at a rate of 3 mph or you would be making $6 per hour. That would be a really slow car, but that is just an example. For ratio, you would use it in baking. If you need 4 cups of flour and 3 cups of sugar, it would be 4:3, 4 to 3, or in fraction form 4 over 3. You can use this to double, triple, quadruple, or even quintuple a recipe if you have lots of people for supper. If you want to triple, 4x3 : 3x3 = 12:9, or 12 cups of flour, and 9 cups of sugar. You can also downsize a recipe. 4 devided by 2 : 3 devided by 2 = 2:1.5 or 2 cups of flour, and 1 and a half of sugar. Also aspect ratio for Computer Monitors can be important if you need to make the screen fit to your tv for example.

Answer 2

Rates: Say at your work you have a copy machine, and you have a large job to run. Lets say the paper drawers hold 1500 sheets of paper, and the copier runs at 50 copies per minute. Suppose you are running 10,000 copies and your boss wants to know when the job will be finished. The rate is 50 copies per minute:

(10000 copies)/(50 copies/minute) = 200 minutes, or 3 hours and 20 minutes.

But you cannot just hit start and come back in 3 hours, 20 min, because the copier will run out of paper in (how long?): (1500 copies)/(50 copies/min) = 30 minutes. So you will have to go and check on the paper supply at least every 30 minutes.