URGENT Basic Math Question

Question

You are working part time and you work 5.1 hours per week. You earn 16 per hour. You only buy potatoes, and 3.6 lb of potatoes cost $ 7.72.

How many weeks do you need to work, to earn enough money to buy 199 lb of potatoes?

Answer 1

The steps to solving this problem:

(1.) finding out the total amount of money you will be making per week.

If you are making 16 dollars per hour, for 5.1 hours per week, to find the total amount of money you will be making per week requires you to multiply 16*5.1= $81.6 dollars/week

Note: (dollar/hour)*(hours/week) the hour components cancel out, so you are left with dollars/week. You can check units throughout problems like these to make sure you're getting the right answers.

(2.) finding the amount of money total you will be spending on 199 lbs of potatoes.

If 3.6 lbs of potatoes cost $7.72, we need to find out how many 3.6lb bags comprise of 199 lbs to find the total cost of the potatoes. In order to do this we divide 199/3.6=55.27. you can also cross check this result by multiplying 3.6 by 55.27, and will find that the result is approximately 199.

Now that we know a 199lbs of potatoes are comprised of 55.27 bags of potatoes, we can simply multiply this number by the cost of one bag to get the total cost for 199 lbs. In totality, it will cost around $426.68.

(3.) dividing the results of 2 and 3.

if we divide $426.68 / $81.60, we will find that it will take approximately 5.23 weeks to make enough money to afford 199lbs of potatoes.