A formula is a statement of a rule that relates different variables to each other. Formulas are used in many situations: banking, building bridges, buying a house, taking a trip, figuring sales tax, or designing a space shuttle. There's even a formula for calculating what the temperature is from how fast the crickets are chirping!

Formulas are often used in sports. For example, baseball fans use this formula to calculate batting averages of players. Here are the records for 3 baseball players for the first 20 games of the season. Let's use the formula to see which one has the best batting average.

Here are the records for 3 baseball players for the first 20 games of the season. Let's use the formula to see which one has the best batting average.

Homerun Harry had 9 hits out of 49 at bats. We can plug these numbers into the formula to calculate his batting average. A batting average is always rounded to three decimal places.

Slugger Sam had 8 hits out of 38 at bats. Here's his batting average.

Pinchhit Pete had 13 hits out of 64 at bats. Here's his batting average.

Slugger Sam has the best batting average of the three players.

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