One of the most common refrains among school children is the question of when they’re going to use math in their lives. After all, it seems that with a phone in hand, there’s no need to worry about doing arithmetic in your head. But that’s not the case. You’re probably relying on the following five measurements every day. Likewise, performing arithmetic and conversions on them without even giving it much thought.
1- Food, Drink, and Cooking
Your diet highlights the most important, and common, use of measurements in daily life. As is often the case for common activities, the specifics aren’t always readily apparent. Think about how often you ask for a cup of something to drink. Or buy soda by the liter. Cups, liters, etc are all measurements. It’s just that people use those terms so often that it’s easy to forget.
2- Weather
The most obvious use of measurement with weather is the temperature. Or to be more precise, how warm it is in Fahrenheit or Celsius. But how you measure the weather goes beyond that. For example, you probably notice if your breath is visible on cold days. That’s a measurement, even if it doesn’t seem like it at the time. You’re essentially checking to see if the temperature is cold enough for your breath to be visible. Or, in other words, it’s a quick test to see if the temperature has dropped below 45° Fahrenheit.
3- Time
You’ll often count the seconds even when you’re not aware of the fact that you’re doing so. People have several internal clocks. For example, one heartbeat is around 0.8 seconds. This means that in moments of calm when you’re aware of your heartbeat, you know how many seconds have passed on an intuitive level. And the same goes for other actions like breathing. People tend to develop their own, albeit rather fuzzy, internal metrics to measure time.
4- Distance
You have an intuitive sense of distance just as you have an intuitive sense of time. People tend to figure out how to convert distance and size through comparison to both themselves and objective measurements. For example, the average man’s pinky finger is about two inches long. It’s easy to do a mental comparison to your index finger to get an educated guess of something’s length. The same goes for large elements, which is why people often talk about something being the size of a pool or football field. This is especially true over time when people use more precise measurement tools. As you build up correlations in your mind you start to have an intuitive sense of them.
5- Medicine
Taking medicine is inherently tied to measurement. It’s simply that much of the measuring has been done beforehand. You don’t need to extract the medicinal elements of a pill to know how many milligrams are in it. But you will check the bottle, or at least measure your dosage by the number of pills you take. And the same goes for liquids. You might not know the exact milliliter count when using liquid medications. But you’ll know how full the oral syringe should be. That process might not be using the numbers on your prescription, but it’s still a measurement.