Fractions, decimals and percentages are important in life. They help us to be precise in maths, cooking, science, engineering, building, and many more.

Hardly anything in real life is going to add up to a whole number – weight, height, width, amounts, money, and a whole lot more. By having fractions, decimals and percentages, we can know the exact amount of something, such as your weight (e.g. 50.9 kilograms, using decimals) or how to split things equally among people (e.g. 4 people splitting something equally will get 25% each). Fractions, decimals and percentages are all around us, mainly in places we can’t see them – however, they are still very important.

For example, measuring the right amount of each ingredient in a recipe for a cake, using fractions like a third of a cup is important to make the cake turn out perfectly. Another example is that percentages and fractions are used during shopping to let us know if something is on sale, and if it is, for how much off – for example, half off, 40% off, 25% off, etc.

On larger scales especially, fractions, decimals and percentages are important for everyday life because precision is often more important because a small mistake in fraction or decimal or percentage will become much bigger and therefore a bigger mistake that could be disastrous. For example, a bridge designer measuring their small scale bridge to the nearest whole number, instead of using decimals, may result in the large scale bridge being wrong – either too big or too short, and therefore, a disaster.

Fractions, decimals and percentages help you in everyday life by helping us do mathematics precisely and properly, which helps us to create things that we want to, in the size that we want them, or to help us divide things equally and fairly. Because of this, without fractions, decimals or percentages in our life, we wouldn’t know how to cook, do maths, do science experiments, measure furniture, make bridges, do rocket science, build, read the time, or measure weight – our lives wouldn’t be the same.

Xavier Sheahan – Year 5W

[Show as slideshow]