Why do we round up 0.5000 to 1 instead of rounding down to 0?

Question

Why do we round up 0.5000 to 1 instead of rounding down to 0?

In: 12

Answer 1

As others have mentioned, we don’t always round 0.5 up. There’s many different methods of rounding that are more appropriate for some applications than others, it just so happens that rounding 0.5 up is good enough for the vast majority of daily life applications.

There are 9 different numbers (0.1 – 0.9) that need rounding and only 2 options (0, 1) to chose from so it’s impossible to divide it evenly with a straight forward method so we had to randomly-ish chose one.