Sentence examples for is a useful approximation from inspiring English sources

The body mass index is a useful approximation of body fat, but it can be misleading for muscular athletic individuals, like President Bush, who would be considered overweight, as the article notes.

Taking to be the lesser value of and is a useful approximation.

In materials science, this is a useful approximation for semi-conductors and a very good approximation for metals at room temperature.

The initial rate of development of constitutional undercooling is shown to be equivalent to the growth restriction factor and is a useful approximation for the effect of solute on grain size when potent nucleant substrates are present.

The ideal line cannot be realised in practice, but it is a useful approximation in many circumstances.

For example, a transfer of a single electron between atoms is a useful approximation for bonds that form between atoms with one-electron more than a filled shell, and others that are one-electron short of a full shell, such as occurs in the compound sodium chloride and other chemical ionic salts.

b The Cloud Harmony website has a discussion of the ECU, and benchmarking that suggests it to be a useful approximation in some ways: http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchmarking-in-cloud.html [accessed 5 February 2013].

It may be viewed as a refinement of the arithmetic mean: the latter has been a useful approximation in economic analysis [5,6], whilst the new mean should find use both in flowsheeting programs and in rapid rating calculations a in the example above.

Hence classical physics seems merely to be a useful approximation to a world which is quantum mechanical on all scales.

The method appears to be a useful approximation for a wide variety of problems.

Clearly a five or seven value discrete scale will not be Gaussian distributed, but this is often assumed to be a useful approximation.