Member-only story
Simplifying Ratios
Ratios are handy for scaling things up or down. It’s best when we can see a clear relationship in the numbers, however, sometimes the numbers aren’t always the easiest to work with. In addition, students sometimes get confused about which two numbers you can simplify and which you can’t.
I was working with such a student last week and came across an approach that I hadn’t used before. I’ll show it to you here.
Say we have the ratio: 36/10 = 342/x.
Assuming that we have a hard time seeing the relationships in numbers like many students do and that we are easily confused about what numbers we can work with. How can we solve this easily?
We can start by setting up the equation for cross multiplying, but not actually doing the multiplying yet.
Before we multiply, let’s simplify. We can do that by finding the factors of the simpler numbers. 36 = 6 X 6 = 2 X 3 X 2 X 3, and 10 = 2 X 5
We can cancel 2s
