A story to share together
The Tea Glass Mistake and Fair Profit Sharing
Four friends making lemonade for the school fair end up with an overly sour first batch because they measured the water with a tea glass. Zeynep measures the glasses to correct the ratio, scales the recipe tenfold, and finds a fair way after sales to reimburse everyone's expenses and split the profit equally based on effort.
Page 1
Every team was going to set up their own stall at the school's spring fair, and Zeynep, Arda, Mert, and Ela decided to sell lemonade. Zeynep brought her grandmother's recipe: five glasses of water and half a glass of sugar for every glass of lemon juice. This recipe yielded six paper cups of lemonade. The team's goal was to sell sixty cups on the day of the fair. For their first test run, they met early on Saturday morning in Zeynep's kitchen and rolled up their sleeves.
Page 2
Arda measured the lemon juice using a water glass, but he poured the water using the first curved tea glass he found in the cupboard. After adding five glasses of water, he stirred it thoroughly and gave everyone a sip in small glasses. Mert's face scrunched up, and Ela began to cough because the lemonade was far too sour. Zeynep first checked the recipe, then looked at the two glasses standing side by side on the counter. One was tall and wide, while the other was small and slim-waisted.
Page 3
Zeynep filled both glasses with water and emptied them into a measuring cup one by one. The water glass held two hundred milliliters, while the tea glass held only one hundred milliliters. That meant Arda had added five hundred milliliters of water instead of one thousand to the two hundred milliliters of lemon juice. The ratio of lemon juice to water in the recipe was one to five, but in their mixture, it was one to two and a half. The amount of lemon juice for every glass of water was exactly double what the recipe called for.
Page 4
They needed to scale the recipe up tenfold to make sixty cups, since one recipe made six cups. This meant ten glasses of lemon juice, fifty glasses of water, and five glasses of sugar. One lemon produced about forty milliliters of lemon juice, which meant five lemons were needed for one glass of lemon juice. For ten glasses, they had to buy fifty lemons. Ela wrote down all the calculations step by step in her notebook.
Page 5
At the market, each lemon cost five liras, so fifty lemons came out to two hundred and fifty liras. A one-kilogram bag of sugar was fifty liras, and one hundred paper cups cost one hundred liras. That brought the total cost to four hundred liras. Zeynep contributed two hundred liras, and Arda and Mert each chipped in one hundred liras. Ela didn't have any allowance, but she promised to bring two large drink dispensers with spigots and a folding table from home.
Page 6
Dividing four hundred liras by sixty cups meant each cup cost about seven liras to make. After a short discussion, they decided to sell each cup for twenty liras. On the morning of the fair, they squeezed fifty lemons and divided everything equally between the two beverage dispensers. Five glasses of lemon juice, twenty-five glasses of water, and two and a half glasses of sugar went into each container, meaning there were thirty cups of lemonade in each one.
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Before long, a long line formed in front of the stall because the weather was very hot. Zeynep filled the cups, Mert collected the money, and Arda and Ela gathered the empty cups and wiped down the table. At the end of four hours, both dispensers were empty, and all sixty cups were sold. One thousand two hundred liras had accumulated in the cash box. Mert quickly did the math in his head: subtracting the four-hundred-lira cost from one thousand two hundred left eight hundred liras in profit.
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Arda immediately made a confident suggestion: “Let's split the money based on how much each person contributed. Zeynep gets two shares, I get one, and Mert gets one.” Dividing the one thousand two hundred liras into four shares gave Zeynep six hundred, and Arda and Mert three hundred liras each. No money was left for Ela because she hadn't contributed any cash. Ela looked down silently at the table, even though she had hurried around and worked just as hard as everyone else for four hours.
Page 9
Zeynep knitted her brows and thought for a moment. “The money we put in isn't profit; it's just what we spent,” she said. “First, let's pay everyone back for their expenses, and then we'll divide the profit based on effort.” Since all four of them had worked the same four hours, the eight-hundred-lira profit was split equally among the four, giving two hundred liras to each of them. Zeynep put each share into a separate pouch; four hundred liras went into Zeynep's pouch, three hundred each into Arda's and Mert's, and two hundred into Ela's.
Page 10
Mert added up the four shares one by one, nodding with satisfaction when he saw the total came to exactly one thousand two hundred liras. Smiling, Ela tucked her pouch into her bag's pocket. Arda stacked the forty unused paper cups on top of each other to make a little tower and set it aside to save for next year. Zeynep opened the spigots of the empty drink dispensers, poured the very last drops into four small cups, and the four friends cheerfully clinked their glasses together.
