Numbers in the Real World
Index of Applications


Numbers in the Real World applications are exploration exercises that build upon the
real-world uses of math discussed in the textbook. Many of these problems require you to visit
and collect data from external Web sites. The problems are organized by the section and page
in the book where a similar problem is found.

Section 1.6, page 56
    College Costs:  Check out the cost breakdown for attending a particular college,
    and do an Internet search for similar cost breakdowns at other colleges on the web.

    Big Money:  Compare your salary to some of your favorite celebrities.

Section 2.1, page 100
    Tangrams:  Learn how to make tangrams and explore the area of each of the pieces.

    Probable Pizza:  Calculate probabilities using pizza ingredients.

Section 2.5, page 130
    Making Dough:  Explore the possibility of owning your own pizza franchise.

    Lottery Clubs:  Find out why people join lottery clubs to increase their chances of winning it big.

Section 2.8, page 154
    Chocolate Cheesecake:  Use fractions to double or half a recipe.  You might want to try the recipe as well.

    Cooking With Honey:  Subsitute honey for sugar in recipes for brownies and cocoa applesauce bread.

Section 3.3, page 190
    Measuring Spoons:  Cook with fractions.

    Don't Screw It Up:  Compare metric and SAE wrenches. A real hands-on activity.

Chapter 3 Summary, page 278
    Taking Stock:  Analyze companies and their worth according to the Stock Market.

    Oddly Enough:  Understand odds used in gambling games.

Chapter 4 Summary, page 286
    Slugging It Out:  Learn what a slugging percentage is in baseball.  Compute the slugging percentage for your favorite hitter.

    National Debt:  Examine the current numbers for the U.S. national debt.  Find out how much your share of it is.

Section 7.1, page 446
    Olympic Proportions:  Look up Olympic records and convert their units of measurement.

    Tons of Elephant Info:  Study the Asian Elephant, a very interesting animal.

Section 7.2, page 456
    In Memory:  Look back at the early computers and their memory capacity.  Compare to modern machines.

    A Whale Of An Animal:  Killer Whales and Lincoln Continentals.  Look here to make the connection.

Section 8.1, page 498
    Off The Roof:  Use ratios to determine dimensions of a house.

    True To Scale:  Compare dimensions of actual cars to their scaled replicas.

Section 8.2, page 504
    Grant You This:  Find what types of arts grants were given, and how much money was awarded to each type?

    Household Budget:  Where does all your money really go?  Break it down using pie diagrams.

Section 9.2, page 598
    Remedial Courses:  How many students really are taking remedial courses in college?  Find out here.

    School Crime:  How safe are you in your school?  Find this out and the reliability of the surveys used.

Section 10.2, page 676
    Stay In School:  See that it really does pay to stay in school.

    Stop Crime:  Analyze statistics from CrimeStoppers, Int.