[Math] Why in some problems we round up and in some problems we round down

algebra-precalculusintuition

The following was written in the book I am reading.

Suppose you’re organizing an outing for $100$ people, and you're renting minibuses that can hold $15$ people each. How many minibuses do you need? Basically you need to calculate$$100 \,÷\,15 \approx 6.7$$But then you have to take the context into account: you can’t book $0.7$ of a minibus, so you have to round up to $7$ minibuses.

Now consider a different context. You want to send a friend some chocolates in the mail, and a first-class stamp is valid for up to $100$ g. The chocolates weigh $15$ g each, so how many chocolates can you send? You still need to start with the same calculation$$100 \,÷\,15 \approx 6.7$$But this time the context gives a different answer: since you can’t send $0.7$ of a chocolate, you'll need to round down to $6$ chocolates.

I can't help but sense that there's a deeper underlying phenomenon going on here. So I have a few questions.

  1. What is actually the deeper thing going on here?
  2. What might be some exercises worth thinking about (i.e. struggling with) to better grasp what is actually going on here, for someone who has virtually zero proof experience in math?

Best Answer

The first problem you are trying to solve is

Seating capacity $\geq$ number of people

and the second problem you are trying to solve is

Package weight $\leq$ weight limit

If you actually wrote out what you were doing, you'd find that when solving these problems, you are ultimately deriving

Number of buses $\geq 6 + \frac{2}{3}$

Number of chocolates $\leq 6 + \frac{2}{3}$

Since both of these numbers are restricted to be integers, these inequations are equivalent to

Number of buses $\geq 7$

Number of chocolates $\leq 6$

Note these are inequalities, not equalities! The solution to the chocolates problem is not "you can send 6 chocolates", but instead "you can send anywhere from 0 to 6 chocolates".

"6 chocolates" is merely the solution to "what is the largest number of chocolates you can send?"

(of course, natural language is very imprecise, and likely the problem intended to ask for the largest number, despite not saying so)

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