a child reads 12 pages in 18 minutes. how many pages can he read in 30

Question

please help, ues it seams easy but i just cant think of it.. i got anxiety in class because i was so stressed trying to think of this.

Answer 1

I hope my solution will not make you anxious.

 

These problems are sometimes called a "rate of work" problems.  When you encounter them, try to tell yourself that once you have the rate for one unit of time, you can calculate for any amount of time.   

 

If the child reads 12 pages in 18 minutes, that is  12/18 pages/minute, 12/18 can be reduced to 2/3 pages/minute by dividing top & bottom by 6.

 

The rate is 2/3 page / minute  (let that sink in:  for every ONE minute, the child reads 2/3rd's of a page).

 

Now given 30 minutes, the child can read  2/3 pages/minute * 30 minutes = 20 pages.

 

I carried along the units of pages / minute to help you see that sometimes the units can help you organize the numbers (if one were tempted to divide by 30 minutes in the last step, they'd see that pages/minutes² doesn't make sense).

 

I hope this helps you!