Worksheet Grade 6 Social Studies & Civics

Maidley Middle School's Lunch Menu and Its Water Footprint

A grade 6 ratio and percent worksheet in which students use published water-footprint figures to compare the water behind two lunch menus at a fictional middle school.

Grade: Grade 6
Subject: Social Studies & Civics
Material: Worksheet
Time: 40 min
Prep: No prep
Materials: Printed worksheet, Calculator (optional)

Standards

6.RP.A.3 Common Core Math

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, including finding a percent of a quantity and converting measurement units.

How this material aligns: Students use ratio reasoning and percent to scale water-footprint rates from one serving to six hundred servings and to find a percent decrease between two menus.

All materials for 6.RP.A.3 →

D2.Geo.4.6-8 C3 Framework

Explain how cultural patterns and economic decisions influence environments and the daily lives of people in both nearby and distant places.

How this material aligns: Students explain how a school menu decision made in one town changes water use on farms in distant places that grow the beef and wheat.

All materials for D2.Geo.4.6-8 →

Download Word file

This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely, without attribution. Updated 2026-07-23.

Objectives

Students will apply a unit rate in gallons per pound to find the water behind a single serving.
Students will calculate the percent decrease in water use between two lunch menus.
Students will explain how a local menu choice affects water use in distant farming regions.

Vocabulary

Water footprint: All the water it takes to make the things we use and eat, counting water used far away. A hamburger's water footprint includes the water that grew the cattle's feed.

Also: unit rate, percent decrease, withdrawal, irrigation

Teacher overview

Food is the largest single use of fresh water in most places, and a school menu is one of the few food decisions a community makes in public. This worksheet uses two commonly cited water-footprint figures, roughly 1,800 gallons of water for a pound of beef and roughly 220 gallons for a pound of wheat, and applies them to lunch at a fictional school in the town of Maidley. Most of the beef figure is rainwater used by the pasture and feed crops that cattle eat, not irrigation or tap water. Students practice unit rates, scaling, and percent decrease while tracing a local decision back to farm fields far away. The arithmetic is kept simple so that students can concentrate on what the ratio between the two numbers means.

Maidley Middle School's Lunch Menu and Its Water Footprint — Grade 6 Social Studies & Civics

Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Student Worksheet

Suppose Maidley Middle School serves 600 lunches on every school day. The kitchen wants to know how much water stands behind the food on those trays. Use these two figures from the Water Footprint Network for every question below.

Beef takes about 1,800 gallons of water per pound.
Wheat takes about 220 gallons of water per pound.

Most of the water behind beef is rain that falls on the grass and feed crops the cattle eat. Show your work for each question.

Write the ratio of the water for one pound of beef to the water for one pound of wheat. Reduce it to lowest terms.
A beef patty on the Maidley menu weighs one quarter of a pound. How many gallons of water stand behind one patty?
A wheat roll weighs one eighth of a pound. How many gallons of water stand behind one roll?
The kitchen serves 600 beef patties on Monday. How many gallons of water stand behind all of them?
The kitchen also serves 600 wheat rolls on Monday. How many gallons of water stand behind all of them?
How many wheat rolls carry the same water as one beef patty? Show the division you used, and round to the nearest tenth.
On Tuesday the kitchen replaces the patties with a bean burger. Suppose one bean burger carries 45 gallons of water. How many gallons stand behind 600 bean burgers?
Compare Tuesday's main dish with Monday's. By what percent did the water for the main dish drop?
Farming uses about 70 percent of the fresh water withdrawn worldwide. Suppose a country withdraws 500 billion gallons in a year and matches that global share. How many billion gallons go to farming?
The beef and the wheat are not grown in Maidley. Explain how a menu choice made in one town changes water use in places far away. Use one number from this worksheet in your answer.

From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.

Answer Key

Answer: 90 to 11. The greatest common factor of 1,800 and 220 is 20: 1,800 divided by 20 is 90, and 220 divided by 20 is 11, so the ratio is 90:11. That is a little more than 8 to 1.
Answer: 450 gallons. One quarter of 1,800 is 1,800 divided by 4, which is 450.
Answer: 27.5 gallons. One eighth of 220 is 220 divided by 8, which is 27.5.
Answer: 270,000 gallons. Multiply 450 gallons per patty by 600 patties.
Answer: 16,500 gallons. Multiply 27.5 gallons per roll by 600 rolls.
Answer: About 16.4 rolls. Divide 450 by 27.5, which gives about 16.36, or 16.4 to the nearest tenth. Students may also reason that 27.5 times 16 is 440, so 16 rolls carry 10 gallons less than one patty, and 10 gallons is a little more than one third of a roll.
Answer: 27,000 gallons. Multiply 45 gallons per burger by 600 burgers.
Answer: 90 percent lower. The drop is 270,000 minus 27,000, which is 243,000 gallons. Divide 243,000 by 270,000 to get 0.9, or 90 percent.
Answer: 350 billion gallons. Seventy percent of 500 is 0.70 times 500, which is 350.
Answer: Accept any answer that connects the menu to farms in other places and uses a figure from the worksheet. A strong answer notes that the 270,000 gallons behind Monday's patties are used on cattle ranches and feed fields far from Maidley, most of it as rain taken up by pasture and feed crops, so the school's order changes how much water those distant farms and pastures use.

Differentiation

Support

Give these students a completed example for a half-pound serving before they begin, and let them use a calculator on every item. Provide a partly filled ratio table for questions 4 and 5 with the one-serving row already entered, and allow them to skip question 9.

Extension

Ask students to price the menu change in water for a full 180-day school year and to state one assumption their answer depends on, such as serving beef every day. Students may also research a third food and add it to the list of figures, citing the source they used.

ELL supports

Pre-teach "footprint" as a figure of speech, since the water is not a print left in the ground, and pre-teach "serving," "per pound," and "decrease." Provide a labeled diagram showing one patty and its gallons, and give sentence frames for question 10: "The beef is grown in ___, so when Maidley orders ___, that place uses ___."

Extensions

Have students survey their own cafeteria menu for a week, sort each main dish into a high-water or low-water column using the two figures on this worksheet, and write a short note to the food service director summarizing what they found.