eli5 if something has 7% of alcohol and you drink 2 bottles of it,you don’t consume 14% of alcohol. but if a cookie has 100 calories and you eat two,you consume 200 calories. why?
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If there are 100mL of a drink which is 7% alcohol, that means there are 7mL of alcohol in it. If you drink two such drinks, you have drank a total of 200mL of liquid, and 14mL of it was alcohol. But what is 14/200? It’s 0.07 or 7%.
Percent is a ratio. It means we don’t need to know the exact value of both items (the alcohol and the total volume). If we know one, we can find the other by using the ratio. But let’s try something that does change like you’re asking. Let’s say you have a few drinks (maybe 3) and your B.A.C jumps from 0 to 0.03% if you drink another 3 drinks, your B.A.C. should jump to about 0.06% this is because you’re adding alcohol to your blood, but you’re not adding (much) more blood. And that’s the denominator of the percent ratio.
For the alcoholic drink, to avoid confusion, let’s just say you’re pouring it into a punch bowl. By pouring one in, you’re adding both water and alcohol so the punch bowl has 7% alcohol in it. If you pour a second drink into the punch bowl you are adding more alcohol (which you would think would make it higher concentration), but you’re also adding more water (which you would think would dilute it) so it cancels out and has the same concentration as before.
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