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Should fast food restaurants rewrite their menus in terms of exercise?

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Should fast food restaurants rewrite their menus in terms of exercise?

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Should fast food restaurants rewrite their menus in terms of exercise? According to the McDonald’s menu, a Big Mac contains 540 calories. But what does that really mean...and would it be more helpful to describe this as “65 minutes of running”?

In this lesson, students write and evaluate expressions to determine how long it takes to burn off foods from McDonald’s and debate the pros and cons of including this information on fast food menus.

REAL WORLD TAKEAWAYS

  • How many calories we burn depends on our weight, the activity we’re engaged in (some burn more than others), and how long we engage in that activity.
  • We can calculate how many calories we need for a specific activity; we can also calculate how long we’d need to engage in a certain activity to burn off some number of calories.

MATH OBJECTIVES

  • Use rate and ratio reasoning to solve real-world problems
  • (Optional) Write and solve one-step equations to determine how much exercise would be needed to burn off different food items.

Great anytime, including at the beginning of a unit before students have any formal introduction to the topic.
Grade 6
Equations & Expressions
Grade 6
Equations & Expressions
Content Standards
Mathematical Practices

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