Teddy bear Company

Question

The Theodore Teddy Bear Company can pack 48 medium size bears in a carton. They received an order for 500 medium bears from the Canadian Traveling Carnival. Estimate the number of cartons needed to ship the order.

Answer 1

"To estimate" means to "roughly calculate or judge the value, number, quantity, or extent of.."

Unfortunately, many teachers do not teach this very important skill; they try to teach a process for finding an exact answer.

NOTE: Even the I.R.S. encourages taxpayers to pay taxes at a full dollar amount.

For this problem, 48 is nearly 50 and 500/50 (which you can compute in your head) is 10.

If you compute it exactly, the answer is 11, so 10 is a very good estimate.

Answer 2

Write down what you know and see what the relationship is to the questions. What I mean by that is...

48 Bears 500 Bears (Keep Bears on Top)

---------------- = --------------------

1 Carton X Cartons (Carton on bottom)

1. Now cross multiply
2. 48(X) = 500 (1) divide both sides by 48 to isolate the X
3. X ≅10.42 cartons, but you cannot have a portion of a carton, so you will need 11 cartons!

I hope this helps!