Sam spent $5.00 on gum balls. He bought 20 gum balls, how much was each gumball?

Question

It's about finding the missing fact or information. I tried but I feel like the answer is not making sense.

Answer 1

In math problems like these, we are needing to do division to find a rate (in this case dollars per gum ball) and also need to respect the units of the problem.

 

First we see that 20 gumboils were purchased for a total cost of 5 dollars...thus the price per gumball is given by the ratio of dollars/gumballs, and can be found by dividing the 5 dollars spent by the 20 gumballs purchased:

 

5/20 = 1/4 is the amount of dollars spent per gumball.

 

We all know that 1/4 = 0.25 so we can express our answer as $0.25 as the cost per gumball...another way to interpret the 1/4 is that this means we spent one quarter (of a dollar) on each gumball that was purchased...and lo and behold 0.25 dollars is in fact what we common call a "quarter" in our US monetary system!

Answer 2

You want dollars per gumball... or $/G... It's a division problem.

 

5/20 = 0.25

 

Gumballs cost $0.25 each... 25 cents