A Spoonful of Sugar

Question

1. A ceramic sugar bowl weighs 340 grams when empty. It is then filled with sugar. One tablespoon of sugar weighs 12.5 grams. The graph represents the relationship between the number of tablespoons of sugar in the bowl and the total weight of the bowl.
2. Which point on the graph could represent your answer to the previous question?

Answer 1

The first thing you need to do is figure out how the data in the graph relates to the question. It says that the weight of the empty bowl is 340g. Looking at the graph, that must mean that the vertical axis relates to weight. Since the problem also discusses the number of spoonfuls of sugar, it makes sense that if the horizontal axis is spoonfuls of sugar, that the point at (0, 340) would be interpreted as the weight of the bowl with zero spoonfuls of sugar.

If you label the axes that way, you can see that approximately 32 spoonfuls of sugar would result in the total weight of the bowl and sugar being 740g.