Algebra I Water Bottles

Question

1. In a race with 96 contestants, you set out 100 bottles of water but only 41 bottles were used. In another race with 215 contestants, you provide 150 bottles but only 84 bottles are used & in a race of 255, again you provide 150 but only 107 water bottles are used. For each of the three races, the number of bottles of water that were used what was the percent of the number of contestants?

 

 

2. You are now planning a race that will have 150 contestants. Use your answers from exercise 1 to predict the number of watter bottles that may be needed at that event.

 

 

Answer 1

1. To get the percentage of water bottles used per contestant, you divide the number of water bottles used by the number of contestants. Ergo,

 

41/96 = 0.427 = 42.7%

84/215 = 0.391 = 39.1%

107/255 = 0.420 = 42.0%

 

2. The key here is to recognize that the number of water bottles provides is not a relevant number, since it's always less than the number needed. We assume that water bottle usage is the average of the last three races, which gives

 

(0.427 + 0.391 + 0.420)/3 = 0.413 = 41.3%

 

Since there are 150 contestants, we figure

 

(150 contestants) * (0.413 bottles per contestant) = 62 bottles