Believe it or not, Maths is a super helpful and very useful tool in everyday life.
We use maths to understand patterns, define relationships, and predict the future (when the chicken will be cooked or how long a journey will take) among other things. Maths helps us do many essential things in our daily lives.
The Top 5 Things We Use Maths For Everday!
When you’re in school or college, it’s hard to understand the ways that what you’re learning is going to come in handy later in life.
It’s hard to know how the skills are going to be useful especially if your chosen career doesn't seemingly require mathematical skills.
But whether it's in school, at work or at home, we all use some form of maths every day, whether we’re aware of it or not.
Below I have listed the top 5 ways we use maths every day...
1 Time Management
For most of us, time is a limiting factor and we need to fulfil several tasks within a couple of hours. Mathematical concepts help us to manage our day to finish all of our tasks.
Which mathematical skills do we need?
- Basic math such as
- addition,
- multiplication,
- subtraction,
- division
- Reasoning (can we actually carry out said task in that amount of time? what needs to wait until another day?)
2 Kitchen Skills
Mathematics also plays a major role in the kitchen. Baking and cooking require some mathematical skills. Every ingredient must be measured and sometimes we need to multiply or divide to get the exact amount we need.
Mathematics helps to estimate the quantity of food to be prepared, where the individual needs to mathematics by calculating the amounts required according to the size of the pot, for example.
Most of the time the maths will look something like this:
- Measuring ingredients
- Multiplying/dividing fractions to make the recipe for more or fewer people
- Converting a recipe from Celsius to Fahrenheit
- Converting a recipe from metric (mL) to units like a teaspoon, tablespoon or cup
- Calculating cooking time per each item and adjusting accordingly
- Finally – Understand ratios and proportions, particularly in baking. For example, if the recipe needs 1 egg and 2 cups of flour, then the ratio of eggs to flour is 1:2
Number of people to feed = How much food is needed (multiply or divide the recipe accordingly)
The individual must know the fractions and ratios, and the knowledge of the weight measuring units used, such as the cup, the weight, the litre, the gram, and others.
Everything we do in the kitchen requires mathematics. Even just using a fireplace is a basic math skill to work.
3 Shopping!
Yes, it's true! We even use maths when we are shopping!
When we are grocery shopping we use it twice as much, we use it to check for use by dates, weights, and quantities while we calculate how much we need and decide which brand is better value for our money.
A more general set of maths skills applicable to all shopping forms include our ability to calculate percentage discounts and estimate the final cost. By using maths in this way you can your shopping experience easier, it also means you are rarely shocked when it comes to paying as you already have made a good estimate and chosen with careful consideration.
4 Sports
Maths can help people to make better decisions based on logic.
When playing team sports, everyone needs to be able to make the right decisions for the team. Studying math helps people to learn how to make analytical decisions based on logic. Therefore, math is important when playing sports.
Which mathematical skills do we need?
- Probability
- Reason
5 Personal Finances
Managing your budget, saving money, and requesting a loan is all to do with maths. With each aspect, there are estimations and allowances to make, taxes to calculate, interest to add, and the list goes on!
This is exactly why a good command of maths is useful for helping with your personal finance. The first step to coming up with a good budget is comparing your income to your expenses.
Which mathematical skills do we need?
- Addition
- Subtraction
Now that we understand some of the many ways we use maths every single day, and why it is so important. I mean, maths makes our life orderly and prevents chaos.
Need Help With Maths?
If your maths skills are a little rusty (it happens the best of us) and you want to brush up on a few of the more 'structural' areas why not try some of the following tips and tricks:
- Online Tutorials - The likes of YouTube have videos for creating budgets or becoming more health conscientious. I quite like this YouTuber My Budgeting Life
- Maths Tutor - If you want to actually a refresher course on some maths skills like calculation percentages, multiplications and more maybe signing up for a maths tutor would be more beneficial. At Superprof lessons start from just €20 per lesson and you get your first lesson free! So why not sign up today?
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