An art teacher makes a batch of purple paint by mixing seven eighths cup red paint with seven eighths cup blue paint. If she mixes 25 ​batches, how many cups of purple paint will she​ have?

Question

Help! It can be written as a mixed number a whole number, or a fraction

Answer 1

This problem is tricky because there are two steps.

First, you need to find out how much purple paint the art teacher makes when she mixes the red paint and the blue paint. Then, you need to find how much purple paint the art teacher has after making multiple batches, 25 of them to be exact.

Let's look at the first part:

An art teacher makes a batch of purple paint by mixing seven eights cup red paint with seven eighths cup blue paint.

That looks like this as a math problem:

7/8 cups + 7/8 cups = 14/8 cups of purple paint in the batch. (The color is important, but we need to focus on how much purple paint was made.)

Now let's look at the second part:

If she mixes 25 batches, how many cups of purple paint will she have?

This tells us we need to do the first step 25 times to get the total amount of purple paint the art teacher made.

25 x 14/8 = 350/8 cups of purple paint! This can reduce as a mixed number or a fraction.

350/8 can have the top and bottom divided by 2. This gives us the answer as a fraction: 175/4.

If you divide the top by the bottom you find this is 43 with 3 left over. That is written as 43 3/4 and is the answer as a mixed number.