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Instinctlol
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I hear teachers say something is proportional to something else. What does "proportional " mean? Can someone explain to me with some examples? Thanks !
Great explanation, thank you!QuarkCharmer said:Proportional means that something changes with respect to something else. For instance, ants eat food, and the more food they eat the more they can reproduce. Thus, the population growth of the ants is proportional to the amount of food. You could also say that the population growth is "inversely proportional" to the amount of ant killer in their environment.
This is usually facilitated by use of a constant of proportionality, sometimes called k. When something is proportional to something else, it does not mean the values are equal, just that they change with respect to each other. The constant of proportionality serves as a multiplier.
If T population growth of ants, and P is the amount of poison in their environment. You could say that:
[itex]T∝P[/itex]
More specifically, that means that the values likely only differ by a constant, so you can say:
[itex]T=kP[/itex]
An example of inversely proportional would be something like:
[itex]T = k\frac{1}{M}[/itex] where M is ant killer, poison, or whatever I said before.
Schrodinger slip?QuarkCharmer said:I just realized that I made an error. This line:
"If T population growth of ants, and P is the amount of poison in their environment. You could say that:"
..should read "food" instead of poison! I hope you caught that one. I will edit my original post to be accurate.
Yes, you missed it.t.francis said:^ freudian slip. Stop mixing up your physicists and psychologists... unless your comment was in irony and I missed it? =P
Proportional means that there is a direct relationship between two quantities, where one quantity changes in relation to the other in a consistent manner.
Proportionality refers to a direct relationship, where the two quantities change in a consistent manner, while correlation refers to a relationship between two variables that is not necessarily direct or consistent.
In direct proportionality, the two quantities change in the same direction, while in inverse proportionality, the two quantities change in opposite directions.
Examples of proportionality can be seen in many aspects of daily life, such as the relationship between height and weight, the amount of ingredients used in a recipe, or the time it takes to complete a task based on the number of people working on it.
Proportionality is used in scientific research to establish relationships between variables and to make predictions based on those relationships. It allows scientists to understand how changes in one variable may affect another and to determine the cause and effect of certain phenomena.