Which Pizza Is A Better Deal?

 

 

• Do four cheese Big Papa’s or one cheese Giant Sicilian give you more pizza for your money?

 

These questions may be useful in helping students down the problem solving path:

• What is a guess that is too low?
• What is a guess that is too high?
• What is your best guess?
• What factors may affect the accuracy of our answer?
• What information do we need to figure it out?

 

This is a real world application of unit rates, area of a circle, and area of square problems.  Students will have to seek out the necessary information from images and videos.

The image below has all of the information students will need to find the unit cost of the Big Papa’s pizza.  As you may expect, some students will use the 36″ measurement as the pizza’s radius instead of the diameter.  If that happens, then they will get roughly 4000 sq inches of pizza, which is more than the Giant Sicilian and hopefully enough of a red light that they realize something went wrong.

The Giant Sicilian’s is a 54″ square pizza.  There is more detail about it in this lesson.

It may be worth discussing that while the unit rate of the Big Papa pizza does not change regardless of the number of pizzas ordered, by the time you reach 3 pizzas, you already have more pizza for the money.

I am also making the assumption that all parts of the pizza are the same so I am not taking into consideration how much is crust versus how much has sauce, cheese, and toppings.
 

• CCSS 3.MD.5 Recognize area as an attribute of plane figures and understand concepts of area measurement.
• CCSS 3.MD.6 Measure areas by counting unit squares (square cm, square m, square in, square ft, and improvised units).
• CCSS 3.MD.7 Relate area to the operations of multiplication and addition.
• CCSS 4.MD.3 Apply the area and perimeter formulas for rectangles in real world and mathematical problems. For example, find the width of a rectangular room given the area of the flooring and the length, by viewing the area formula as a multiplication equation with an unknown factor.
• CCSS 6.RP.1 – Understand the concept of a ratio and use ratio language to describe a ratio relationship between two quantities. For example, “The ratio of wings to beaks in the bird house at the zoo was 2:1, because for every 2 wings there was 1 beak.” “For every vote candidate A received, candidate C received nearly three votes.”
• CCSS 6.RP.2 – Understand the concept of a unit rate a/b associated with a ratio a:b with b ≠ 0, and use rate language in the context of a ratio relationship. For example, “This recipe has a ratio of 3 cups of flour to 4 cups of sugar, so there is 3/4 cup of flour for each cup of sugar.” “We paid $75 for 15 hamburgers, which is a rate of $5 per hamburger.”
• CCSS 6.RP.3 – Use ratio and rate reasoning to solve real-world and mathematical problems, e.g., by reasoning about tables of equivalent ratios, tape diagrams, double number line diagrams, or equations.
• CCSS 7.G.4 Know the formulas for the area and circumference of a circle and use them to solve problems; give an informal derivation of the relationship between the circumference and area of a circle.

 

• Modern Marvels
• Big Mama’s Pizza