Writing and Evaluating Expressions.

Question

Several people from groups with 8 people in each group. Write an expression for the number of each groups by p people. How many groups are formed if there are 96 people?

Answer 1

Zoe,

When writing expressions, the approach I've always taken is to first think about what kind of operations you need to use to find the answer that you need.

For this one, you need to determine how many groups are formed by a particular number of people. Since this problem gives you a number to solve for, think about how you would determine how many groups of 8 are formed by 96 people.

We would need to divide 96 by 8 people, right?

So how would we apply this to any number of people? Lets start by writing an equation and setting it equal to the number of groups:

groups = ????

According to the question, the number of people is p. So all we need to do is write our 96 divided by 8 in terms of p. So instead of 96, we write p for an unknown number of people.

groups = p/8

We now have an expression that works or any number of people. Now, you just need to calculate the number of groups for 96 people.

groups = 96/8

groups = 12