Remember me
A-Z Browse

ratiomathematics

Citations

MLA Style:

"ratio." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2008. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 21 Aug. 2008 <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/491990/ratio>.

APA Style:

ratio. (2008). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved August 21, 2008, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/491990/ratio

ratio

Link to this article and share the full text with the readers of your Web site or blog-post.

If you think a reference to this article on "ratio" will enhance your Web site, blog-post, or any other web-content, then feel free to link to this article, and your readers will gain full access to the full article, even if they do not subscribe to our service.

You may want to use the HTML code fragment provided below.

We welcome your comments. Any revisions or updates suggested for this article will be reviewed by our editorial staff. Contact us here.

Regular users of Britannica may notice that this comments feature is less robust than in the past. This is only temporary, while we make the transition to a dramatically new and richer site. The functionality of the system will be restored soon.

Users who searched on "ratio" also viewed:
ratio scale
  • psychological testing and measurement psychological testing

    ...of odours), it constitutes an ordinal scale. An interval scale has equal units and an arbitrarily assigned zero point; one such scale, for example, is the Fahrenheit temperature scale. Ratio scales not only provide equal units but also have absolute zero points; examples include measures of weight and distance.

compression ratio

in an internal-combustion engine, degree to which the fuel mixture is compressed before ignition. It is defined as the maximum volume of the combustion chamber (with the piston farthest out, or bottom dead centre) divided by the volume with the piston in the full-compression position (with the piston nearest the head of the cylinder, or top dead centre). A compression ratio of six means that the mixture is compressed to one-sixth its original volume by the action of the piston in the cylinder. The maximum possible ratio based on cylinder dimensions may not be achieved if the intake valve closes after the piston begins its compression stroke, as this would cause backflow of the combustible mixture from the cylinder. A high ratio promotes efficiency but may cause engine knock.

ratio (mathematics)
  • analytic geometry mathematics

    ...“mechanical” curves generated by kinematic processes. The Archimedean spiral, for example, was generated by a point moving on a line as the line rotated uniformly about the origin. The ratio of the circumference to the diameter did not permit exact determination:

    the ratios between straight and curved lines are not known, and I even believe cannot be discovered by men,...

  • theory of Omar Khayyam mathematics

    That postulate, however, was only one of the questions on the foundations of mathematics that interested Islamic scientists. Another was the definition of ratios. Omar Khayyam, along with others before him, felt that the theory in Book V of Euclid’s Elements was logically satisfactory but intuitively unappealing, so he proved that a definition known to Aristotle was...

AAA Math - Ratios
Math League Help Topics - Ratio and Proportion
signal-to-noise ratio (communications)
  • information theory information theory

    ...bits per second, where B is the bandwidth of the channel, and the quantity S/N is the signal-to-noise ratio, which is often given in decibels (dB). Observe that the larger the signal-to-noise ratio, the greater the data rate. Another point worth observing, though, is that the...

  • radio transmission telecommunications media

    The range of a radio communications link is defined as the farthest distance that the receiver can be from the transmitter and still maintain a sufficiently high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for reliable signal reception. The received SNR is degraded by a combination of two factors: beam divergence loss and atmospheric attenuation. Beam divergence loss is caused by the geometric spreading of the...

nutrient-cost ratio (agriculture)
  • animal feed feed

    Feed costs vary widely from season to season; it is often possible for producers to realize substantial savings through wise selection of the feed ingredients used to formulate complete diets. It is much easier for large commercial feed companies with widespread operations to take advantage of regional variations in feed prices than it is for individual relatively small-scale livestock...

Table of Contents

Audio/Video

JavaScript and Adobe Flash version 9 or higher is required to view this content. You can download Flash here:
http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer