Question

Angie used 4 apples and 5 strawberries in her fruit salad. Salim used 7 apples and 9 strawberries. Did Angie and Salim use the same ratio of apples to strawberries? If not, who used the greater ratio of apples to strawberries?

Answer 1

We can write a ratio between two quantities, x and y, as:

x to y.

To find if two ratios:

"a to b" and "c to d" are equal, we need to see if the quotientes:

a/b and c/d are equal.

Here we know that the ratios are:

4 apples to 5 strawberries, this gives the quotient 4/5 = 0.8

7 apples to 9 strawberries, this gives the quotient 7/9 = 0.78

So the quotients are different, which means that the ratios are not equal.

Now we want to see who used a greater ratio of apples to strawberries.

notice that in the numerator we used the number of apples, so as larger is the quotient, larger is the ratio of apples to strawberries.

We can see that the quotient of Angie is larger, then Angie used the greater ratio of apples to strawberries.