Real-Life Math
"It's ALL math," says Guy Shoemaker. He's president of a flour milling organization. "Pricing, yield calculation, selling, trading -- math is the basis of all we do."
When flour is mixed for specific types of bread, Shoemaker says they mix certain percentages of spring wheat with a certain percentage of hard red winter wheat. "Or we'll blend it for a specific protein content. From simple procedures to sophisticated computer planning models, everything uses math."
You are a miller for Family Farm Milling Co. It's a mill that runs 24 hours a day. Typically, your mill produces around 456 bags of flour every 24 hours. These are 50-pound bags.
One day, your mill is out of production because a part of the machinery had to be fixed. The repair required replacing the part and took much longer than you expected. The mill was shut down for 7 hours.
About how much flour would the mill produce that day?
To fill your customers' orders, you'll need to ship out 36,250 pounds of flour right away. If you have 250 bags available in stock to add to what was produced that day, will you have enough flour to cover the orders?