What are the people on Wattpad good at? Reading and writing, of course! Who needs math? What is math?
I'm a math nerd here, ready to help anyone understand any question they can ever have about math. I'll try to give simple and clear explanations. S...
Hello again everyone! This chapter is going to be a bit different from previous chapters, since I'll be working with a specific example problem. Hopefully my explanation and tips are clear enough that you can apply them to similar problems that you might run into in other places.
So, here's the problem:
Johnny played 3 1/2 video games in an hour. How many could he play in 40 minutes?
The first thing you should notice when you see this problem is that Johnny really likes video games.
....I'm kidding, of course. All humor aside, the real first thing you should notice is that this problem deals with proportions.
A quick Google search of the word brings up a few definitions, but the one we're using is "the relationship of one thing to another in terms of quantity, size, or number; ratio."
The most common use of the proportion is in measuring the speed of cars: for example, 50 miles per hour. In this example the two things being put in relation to one another are the distance the car can go (50 miles) and what amount of time it takes (one hour). The quantities being used are miles and hours.
What things are put in relation to one another in the example problem? The amount of video games played and the amount of time it takes to play them. The quantities being used are the number of video games, hours, and minutes.
The second thing that you should notice is that there are two proportions: 3 1/2 video games in one hour and an unknown amount of video games in 40 minutes. One of these proportions is missing a piece; that piece is what you need to find to answer the question.
So let's put these proportions into an equation. Back to the example of a car's speed, you could write it out like this:
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Or, you could write it like this.
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This way is much more useful in equations.
Once you've written it in this form, it is also helpful to specify all the quantities. In the second way I wrote it, I specified 50 as the number of miles, but I haven't specified the number of hours. When you write it like this, it is implied that "hr" actually means "1 hr."
