Without Math, Your Life Would Be Harder Than You May Think

Math has always been a nightmare to a lot of students who may think that the subject is useless for their future jobs and lives. However, the fact is mathematics has much more applications than assumed, covering a number of areas in our everyday life. And the following are some of the most obvious and greatest applications of Math we have seen.

1. Financial management

This is probably the most practical application of Math. If you cannot subtract or add correctly, you can hardly survive in a world where we have to spend money on all the products and services we use.

Many may think that a normal person doesn’t need math knowledge beyond arithmetic’s basic concepts to manage their own money, but that’s not true. You need to understand higher math like Algebra to be able to comprehend the terms of an investment or a loan account. This is because these kinds of money markets involve the concepts of exponential group.

Take a typical mortgage, for example, you calculate the monthly interest using the compound interest formula. And if you don’t know how compound interest works, you are likely to lose lots of money.

Knowledge of high math will even help you predict your future spending habits, which you can use to make future expenditure plans as well as set financial goals for yourself.

2. Home improvement

Math helps you repair or remodel your home efficiently. With basic math skills, you can calculate the amount of material required to get the job done. For instance, a tile installer needs to calculate the floor area to find out the number of tiles needed, while an electrician has to calculate how much wire is needed for a new electrical outlet. Even when you simply repaint a room, you need math.

Regarding home improvement, math can give answers to multiple questions of a homeowner. For example, if there’s a dripping faucet in the house, they can measure the drip rate to find out the amount of water lost in a set amount of time, hence know how much money they could lose.

Math also helps you with your usage of electricity. You can calculate how much electricity is consumed by each device or activity in your home.

3. Exercise, health, and fitness

Math skills make a great help in this category, especially if you’re on a diet and need to calculate the calories you take in to reduce your Body Mass Index. You can also find out your own body fat percentage with several existing equations, from which you can see the progress.

In terms of gymnastics, particularly weight lifting, you need math in determining how much weight you’re lifting, keeping records of important indicators.

4. Outdoor landscaping

Let’s look at this specific example, where you want to set up a raised planter box that is 2.4 meters long, 0.6 meters wide, and 0.3 meters deep. You intend to buy a bagged soil mix with each bag able to fill a given volume, with a specific weight and price. Through a number of calculation steps, math will help you find out the amount of dirt you need to buy to fill your planter box as well as the expense for it. You will also know what vehicle required to carry the dirt.

5. Filling a pool with water

You have a new pool that you want to fill up. However, you are not sure how long it will take and sure, you don’t want the pool to overflow while you’re away or not paying attention. Math kicks in, it will help you find out when the pool will be full. Or otherwise, you can calculate to determine a fill rate so that you can finish filling the pool in a particular time you want.

6. In the office

For example, your team is tasked with printing a number of documents in a given time, with the given facilities at the office. Now, you need to figure out if the task is feasible by calculating how much time it will take to get it done using the human and machine resources you’ve got. If the result time is good, you can head to work with your teammates; otherwise, you can think of other solutions. This is much better than begin the task without thinking and run into trouble later and fail to complete the task.

There are a lot more examples for this case, but you have got the idea of it.

Conclusion

The cases we mentioned above are just a few of the vast applications of mathematics, but as you can see, math lives everywhere around us, even in cases that you never think you need math.

So, math is not unnecessary, it’s important and useful for our everyday life. And it’s never too late to start improving your skill and make your life easier.