Algebra math help

Question

A wedding planner needs to determine how many appetizers to order for between 300 and 330 guests. Should she use an exact answer, an approximation, or an estimate?

Answer 1

The problem:

A wedding planner needs to determine how many appetizers to order for between 300 and 330 guests. Should she use an exact answer, an approximation, or an estimate?

A good question. Let's look a bit more closely at this:

1. We are told the guests will number somewhere between 300 and 330 people, but we don't know for sure how many. Common sense would tell us that without an exact number of guests to order for, there is no way the wedding planner can give us an exact answer on the number of appetizers to order. So I think we can safely cross that one off of our list.
2. An approximation, as it is defined, means getting closer/nearer to something. In math, that means getting closer to a known answer. I guess a good example of using an approximation in math would be every time we use pi. As a young student, I learned that pi was 3.14. By the time I was in high school, I was using 3.14159 for pi.The actual value of pi didn't change, I was just using more precision for my calculations. But we don't have a single number to get closer to, we have a spread of 300-330. So once again, without knowing what our number is, an approximation is not the right answer.
3. An estimate is a guess. Even an educated guess, which a skilled wedding planner should be able to provide, is still just a guess. That implies a margin of error, it could go higher or lower. Just like the number of guests.

My conclusion: the wedding planner should use an estimate in this situation.