I have to have formula to answer the question

Question

In early 2010 the US population was about 308 million. The national debt was well over $12 trillion. In millions of dollars the debt was $12,367,728. How much did each American owe in early 2010? Report your answer in thousands of dollars rounded to the nearest whole number

Answer 1

Hi  Suzette!  Since you say you need a formula along with the answer: debt_per_person = national_debt/population.

 

$12,367,728,000,000/308,000,000 = $40,145.96

 

Rounding to the nearest whole number (the nearest dollar) this becomes $40,146

 

Usually people break problems like this down with a key:

 

dp:  debt per person

nd: national debt

p : population

 

So this becomes dp = np/p and this is closer to what you are probably used to seeing in a textbook.

 

The principle is that we take to total of something and divide it by the number of things involved and get a breakdown of how much stuff each participant has.  It's exactly the same when you want to see how many cookies each child can eat if you have 12 cookies and 4 children (except the numbers are larger).