word problem

Question

6 missionaries travel to a country with the population of 4,100 for 5 weeks. How many people would each missionary have to talk to per day, per hour and per secon

Answer 1

I'm guessing that the idea is to talk to the entire population of the country.  But that's only a guess. 

Answer 2

Hi Glenda, first something appears to be missing from the problem statement. With that in mind, we can convert 5 weeks to days, hours, seconds.

 

Days:

 

number of days = (7 days / 1 week) * (5 weeks) = 35 days

 

Hours:

 

numbers of hours = (24 hours / 1 day) * (35 days) = 840 hours

 

Seconds:

 

number of seconds = (60 secs / 1 minute) * (60 minutes / 1 hour) * (840 hours) = 3024000 seconds

 

If we divide 4100 by 35, we can determine how many people would need to be talked to per day.

 

people to talk to per day = 4100 / 35 ≈ 117

 

Divide 117 by 6 to find out how many people each missionary would need to talk to each day.

 

number of people per day = 117 / 6 ≈ 20

 

If we divide 4100 by 840, we can determine how many people would need to be talked to per hour.

 

people to talk to per hour = 4100 / 840 ≈ 5

 

The 6 missionaries would need to talk to about 5 people each hour.

 

If we divide 4100 by 3024000, we can determine how many people would need to be talked to per second.

 

people to talk to per second = 4100 / 3024000 ≈ .001 

 

We need the rest of the problem to complete the solution.

 

Questions?