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Confident about making up serial dilutions?

Confident enough to do it BACKWARDS?

"Why on earth would you want to do THAT?"

Suppose you have a stock culture and want to know how many live cells are in it.

If you plate out 1 mL of the straight culture, there are so many cells in it that they will cover your growth medium. You won't be able to see the distinct colonies. So you must dilute it before plating it out.

But then you will find the number of cells that were in a mL of the DILUTED culture, and you wanted to know about the original stock culture.

You'll have to back-calculate to get the number of cells in the stock culture.