Cindy’s square-shaped garden has side lengths of x ft. She will plant 5 tulip bulbs per square foot. How many bulbs will she plant if the garden has a side length of 8 feet?

Answer 1

For me, I'm a very visual learner, so with word problems I always draw a picture (or doodle, I don't draw well).

We know the garden is square, so I drew a square. The side length is x, so I labeled one side as "x". The cool part about it being a square, is that all the sides have to be the same length, right? So, I went ahead and labeled another side as "x".

So for the next sentence in the problem, we find out that she plans on planting 5 tulips for every square foot (wow, lots of gardening). On the side of my paper, I just noted that 1 ft² = 5 tulips.

The next sentence helps us put all this info into some good use, what if we had a side of the garden equal 8 feet long? Now that we have our problem set up, we go ahead and label 1 of the sides of our square as being 8 feet long. We know that we are wanting to find the area, because we need to know how many square feet we have, to know how many tulips to plant.

What's the area of a square? We know to find area typically, A = L*W, or in the instance of a square, the sides are the same length so it is just side * side. So we have 2 lengths, each are 8 feet long, A = 8 * 8

so area is 64 ft²

So now we have area is 64 ft², and from before we recall that every square foot has 5 tulips ( 1 ft² = 5 tulips), how do we find the number of tulips for the entire square garden? Next we multiply, 64 * 5 = 320 tulips. :D

320, that's a whole lot of flowers! Glad I'm not in charge of all that work, lol