students***
Responses (1)
Get a ruler in your hands. Measure things until you start to understand how a ruler works. Measure some stuff and figure out where the center is. Say you measure a book and it's 7/8" thick. You look at your ruler and see that every eighth is divided into two sixteenths, so obviously half of 7/8" is going to be 7/16". If you write that out you have 1/2 x 7/8 = 7/16. And you notice that 1/2 is divided into 2/4 and then into 4/8 and so on, so you can convert anything to anything by multiplying all the numbers on top and then all the numbers on bottom.
Other rulers are divided into 10 and 100 parts. But an inch is still an inch, so anything on one ruler can be translated to the other ruler. A half inch on one ruler is 5/10 or 50/100 on the other. An eighth inch is just 12.5 marks when you have 100 marks per inch. A metric ruler divides an inch into 25.4 parts, so a half inch would be 12.7 of those parts. Pretty simple, isn't it? Practice this a bit and people will think you went to wizard school.
"Ratio" means how two numbers relate, same as a fraction on a ruler. So if you had a ruler with 23 marks, then the number of teachers would be 8 marks. So if you went to a class with 46 students and you wanted to keep the same ratio, there would be 16 teachers.
A proportion is a ruler. You might use one ruler marked in inches to measure something and another ruler marked in feet to build something exactly twelve times as large. Architects use a three sided ruler with six different size marks for that purpose and you can buy one at any office supply store or school book store. Get a ruler in your hand and do the exercise I suggested and you will be very much better at all kinds of math.
sorry the 23:8 ratio is wrong. I meant to put 23:2. So how many students would there be if there were 8 teachers? and what is a proportion?