What Is Estimation and Where Do You Start?
Have you ever seen your teachers, elders, and friends making wild guesses about a material, object, and a person? Does this make you wonder how you are so well at making such estimates? If that's what you think, here we tell you a little secret. You can make wild guesses or estimates too about the weight of objects or persons.
Estimating is a skill that you will greatly need in mathematics as well as in your daily life. To make it easier for you, let's make you learn estimation starting with a grocery store. Look at the example below:
You are on a grocery store and you find your favorite golden apples there. You notice that the apples are for $1. 00 a pound. This is something to keep in mind before you start filling your shopping bag. Remember you have only $2.00 in your handbag, and you can't buy more than two pounds of apples. How will you make sure you don't cross 2 pounds? Yes, you can do it with a scale, but consider that it's broken too.
One strategy you can use is trying to make mental estimation with similar objects. Use specific weight units like ounce for lighter objects, pounds for medium objects, and kilograms for heavy objects.
At times, you would probably have wondered, what if you could take a walk across the city and make estimations easily. For example: How much the restaurant bill would cost?
The area of a property, a mall, or an angle of a thing.
Which is the best item for the value of money you are paying?
How many people are there in an orchestra?
Wouldn't it be great? Note that we are not talking about exact answers here, but the answers you will find will be much closer to the exact value. An estimation is a value that is very close to an exact value of something. If we put in other words, it is more like approximation. For example, USA states that the statistics for having ideal number of children is 2.5. Now it is obvious that no one can have a half kid, can you? So, we can estimate that the number to be either 2 or 3.
The general rule for making an estimation in mathematics is to look at the digit that is right after the digit you want to estimate, if it is greater than 5 round it up, if it is less than 5 round it down.