Ratios in the Kitchen Get ready for math to invade your kitchen Let’s say you are baking a cake for your best friend’s birthday You want to use your grandmother’s recipe for the perfect yellow cake Let’s look at that recipe ½ cup 113 g butter 1 ½ cups 193 g sugar 3 large eggs 2 ¼ cups 288 g all-purpose flour 1 teaspoon 5 69 g salt 3 ½ teaspoons 17 5 g baking powder 1 ¼ cups 294 74 mL milk 1 teaspoon 4 93 mL vanilla 4
Sounds scrumptious right Well you decide to add extra sugar to it because you love sweets 5
Your cake comes out of the oven cools off and you take a taste Pffff You have to spit it out That sure doesn’t taste like Grandma’s perfect yellow cake 6
What are Ratios Why do you think the cake did not taste good Here’s why RATIOS A ratio is a comparison of two quantities using division There are many ratios in Grandma’s recipe for yellow cake The ratio of sugar to eggs flour butter and the other ingredients is a set amount in the recipe Circumference Diameter Circumference Diameter 3 1415926 A Famous Ratio Pi or π is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter c d That means if you divide the circumference of any circle by that circle’s diameter you will always get the ratio pi Pi is substituted with 3 14 an estimate in many formulas because the real decimal equivalent to pi has an infinite number of digits Mathematicians have already discovered 13 3 trillion digits of pi 7
