Rates & proportional relationships FAQ

Rates and proportions are important concepts in math that can help us understand relationships between different quantities. They come up frequently in everyday life - for example, when we're comparing prices, figuring out how much of an ingredient to use in a recipe, or determining how fast we need to travel to reach a destination on time.

A constant of proportionality is a number that relates two quantities in a proportional relationship. For example, if we say that $y$‍ is proportional to $x$‍, we might write the equation $y=kx$‍, where $k$‍ is the constant of proportionality.

The constant of proportionality is another name for the unit rate. Suppose Zion skips rope at a constant rate, and they skip over a jump rope $135$‍ times in $3$‍ minutes. There are two unit rates:

To tell which unit rate to use, we need to know the meaning of $x$‍ in the equation. Suppose $x$‍ represents the number of minutes and $y$‍ represents the number of skips. Then the constant of proportionality would be $45$‍, the unit rate that had the number of minutes in the denominator.

Try it yourself with our Compare constants of proportionality exercise.

There are a few ways we can tell if two quantities are proportional to each other. We might see that the ratio between the two quantities is always the same, or we might see that a graph of the two quantities forms a straight line through the origin (the point where both $x$‍ and $y$‍ are equal to $0$‍).

Try it yourself with our Identify proportional relationships exercise.

To write a proportion, we set two rates equal to each other. For example, we might say ${\displaystyle \frac{2}{4}}={\displaystyle \frac{6}{12}}$‍.

Solving a proportion just means finding the missing value in the proportion. For example, if we know that $8$‍ out of $12$‍ oranges are ripe, and we want to figure out how many out of $24$‍ oranges would be ripe at the same rate, we can set up a proportion like this: ${\displaystyle \frac{8}{12}}={\displaystyle \frac{x}{24}}$‍. Notice that we use the same rate ${\displaystyle \frac{\text{ripe oranges}}{\text{total oranges}}}$‍ on both sides of the equation.

From there, we can use one of the methods for solving equations.

Solving the equation can take an extra step if the unknown is in the denominator of the equation. Suppose we had set up the equation using the rate ${\displaystyle \frac{\text{total oranges}}{\text{ripe oranges}}}$‍ instead.

Try it yourself with our Solving proportions exercise.