“One cutting chai, please!”- We always use such phrases almost every single day. The word ‘cutting’ here refers to 1/2 and this half is what we call a fraction. Fractions are an indispensable part of our life and without even realizing it, we constantly use fractions in our day-to-day tidings. Whether it is 1/2 a dozen bananas in your shopping list or baking a yummy chocolate cake with 3/4th cup of flour and 1/4th cup of milk, everything around us involves fractions.
Here are some common, everyday things that we use fractions for:
- Fraction of seconds: The shutter speed of a camera is measured in fractions. The setting of this is important, to capture perfect photos. Usually, a still image is captured at a speed of 1/100th of a second. For objects in motion, we set a faster shutter speed of about 1/1000th of a second to avoid blur images.
- Timetable: Every time you make a timetable for a subject and divide it into portions for ease of study, you are simply using fractions to do it. For e.g.: if we are opting to study 5 chapters in Physics out of 10, it can simply be represented as 5/10- and again Fractions!
- Fraction in food: Chocolate, bread, or any other food item needs to have the right measurement of all the ingredients. Just like a chocolate bar has 3 and 1/2 portion of sugar and 5 and ¼ portion of milk. Your favorite brand of chocolate tastes the same and the quality is consistent because the quantity of all the products was mixed in the fraction or proportion.
- Furniture: Making any furniture requires measurement in fractions. A study table needs to be cut from a big piece of plywood which needs to fit the space in your room. Let us say you’re your table is probably 5’4 1/4 inch long. A little variation in the size and your table might not fit in your room.
- Fraction of fashion: Tailoring is all about the right measurement of cloth. A meter and a ½ might be needed to make your school shirt. The curtains of your home might be two and a quarter meter. The right fraction always leads to the perfectly fitted garment.
Yes, fractions are everywhere. This may seem odd to us because when we first learn math, we learn easier concepts and the whole numbers system. As our education progresses, we are introduced to more complex aspects of math, but our minds are trained to look for what we first learned. As such, we tend to ignore the presence of fractions even though they are pretty much all around us all the time. Hence, having the right foundation, and understanding its real-life application is extremely crucial.