Demonstrating Math Competency through Life Application - Essay Example

How I applied Math in My School Days During my school days, I invariably used to come across the discount wars among marketers. Someone would offer a discount of 10% while their rival would come forward to lure with huge 30% discount. It was difficult for me to understand in those days what financial impact it could make on buyers like me. In one of the instance, during mid ‘80s, in one of the campaigns ADIDAS shoes were offered with huge 25 % discount if three pairs were bought at a time. As such, if I bought a single pair it would cost me $24 and I had no capacity to buy three in a single stretch.

I calculated the saving that I would get if I bought three pairs and that came to 24 ? (25/100) = $6. That was huge for me as that was my weakly pocket money. I immediately convinced my two of the friends and purchased three pairs of ADIDAS shoes from the shop, one for each of us and that is how each one of us saved a good sum of money. Since then I grabbed many opportunities of buying stuffs available during their huge discounted offerings. In fact, I truly realized the mathematical meaning of the discounts then.

My Outing to the City of New York At age 20, I decided to go to New York City for outing with my three friends during our 4-day vacation in college. I needed to estimate the money that we must have in our pocket before we could really plan such tours. Since we decided to hire a car, our expenses on gas needed to be counted to arrive at the major travelling expense on this tour. We selected Honda midsized rental car. In those days, they used to charge rental of nearly $20 a day. We selected Honda because that would give us a good fuel economy of 36 miles per gallon.

I checked map and found that the distance between Richmond and New York was 340 miles. Counting two and fro distance between these two cities, I got the distance of 340 ? 2= 680 miles. For roaming the tourist places around the New York City during our three days’ stay over there, I added another 300 miles in total mileage. Thus, I arrived at the figure of 680+300= 980 miles that our rental car would run around in our outing. Based on this, I needed to calculate the gas consumption and its cost, given that Honda gave fuel economy of 36 miles per gallon.

Consumption of gas = total running / fuel economy = 980/36 = 27.22 gallons. In those days, gas would sell at $1.2 per gallon. Hence, expense toward gas would be 27.22 ?1.2 = $32.66. Car rentals for four days would be 20 ? 4 = $80 Total expense on transportation would be 32.66 + 80 = $112.66 Dividing the expense among four of us, each one needed to bear the cost of 112.66/4 = $ 28.16. Adding the cost of hotel rooms and food expenses on this, I got the fair idea what we needed to have in our pocket before starting this tour.

Math did help me in planning and preparing a budget for the tour. Math in Recipe Preparation I am fond of cooking and love preparing, serving and eating desserts. A couple of years back, I came across a recipe from an East Indian author. The name of the recipe was Almond Jelly with Fruit Cocktail. The recipe had 8 ingredients and the preparation was given to serve 8 people. Since we were 5 people in the family and I was making it for the first time, I decided to go for quantity that was enough for 5 people.

The recipe had the following ingredients. China grass-- 15 tablespoons; Sugar- 18 tablespoons; Milk-- 4 cups; almonds blanched -- 2 tablespoons, Leeches- 500 grams; Pineapple