if I have 6 people unloading a truck with a case count of 2230. they took 2 hours and 17 minutes to unload the truck. how many cases per hour did they unload?

Question

I'm trying to figure out how many did each Unloader unload per hour. How do I figure this out and what's the formula. 

Answer 1

It's better not to think of finding a formula, but rather to understand how it works.

 

To figure out how many cases they unloaded per hour, you'd have to divide the number of cases by the number of hours.  But you don't know the number of hours per se.  You know the number of hours and minutes.  So you have to convert that to hours, as a decimal.

 

Since there are 60 minutes in an hour, 17 minutes is 17/60 of an hour.  That's 0.283 hours.  So they worked for a total of 2.283 hours.

 

If they unloaded 2230 cases in that amount of time, they unloaded 2230 / 2.283 = 977 cases per hour.

 

Now, there were 6 people who did that unloading, and without any other information, you'd have to guess that they all worked at the same rate.  So if it's 977 cases per hour for 6 people, it's 977 / 6 = approximately 163 cases per hour per person.

 

Answer 2

Well, first we should convert 2hrs17mins to a decimal in the units of hours (since we are looking for cases per hour unloaded).  2hrs17min = 2+17/60 hours= 137/60 hours.

 

Next we consider that 2230 cases were unloaded in 137/60 hours, so cases per hour can be found by dividing these two numbers:

 

Cases per hour = 2230/(137/60) = 2230*60/137

 

Next, considering that we had 6 unloaders, if we assume they each work at the same rate and unload the same number of cases per hour we can divide cases per hour by number of loaders to get an individual rate per hour for each unloader.  More precisely this is an average work rate for the entire group of unloaders (since we cannot really know that one unloader unloads as many cases as one of his coworkers does in a given hour).

 

Avg cases unloaded per unloader per hour = 2230*60/(137*6)

 

Hope that helps!