Learning and Teaching for Mathematical Literacy

Activity from the How risky is life project from Bowland Maths.

This diagram shows a way of visualing very small risks. There are 100 large squares, each consisting of 100 small squares. if the entire diagram is taken to represent the population of a country about the size of the UK - say, 50 million people - then each small square represents 5000 people. The activity is to colour in the squares representing the numbers of annual deaths from the statistics provided (and to discover that the shaded areas are so tiny that this is almost impossible).

Click on the image below to zoom in/out