From the course: Learning Everyday Math
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Estimation in mental math
- In this movie, I'm going to explain how important the concept of estimation is when working with math. Before you begin, pretty much any math problem, try and see if you can take an educated guess about what the answer is going to be. This has a couple of different benefits. The first one is, when you actually do do the math, you might catch if you've made a mistake if you're way off of your estimate. For example, let's go back to estimating the sales tax on a pair of shoes. Let's say the pair of shoes is $89 and the sales tax is 8%. Even before you calculate, maybe you could take a quick guess, you might say, well 8% is not that far off from 10%, and to find 10% of a number, we just move the decimal point one space to the left and rewrite the number. If I did that for 89, I would rewrite it as $8.90. My estimate for 8% of 89 would be a little bit less than $8.90. I might call it, more like $8. Now when I actually do the math for this situation, I will probably catch myself if I…
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