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A car travels at a constant speed of 75 miles per hour. How far in miles will the car travel in 20 minutes?
Ooh, maths homework eh?
When you’re faced with one of these where it’s two units, just turn the whole thing into the same units. For instance, pounds and pence- just turn the pounds into pence.
This time it’s hours and minutes. So turn hours into minutes. There’s sixty minutes to an hour and so 75/60 = 1.25 (or 1 1/4 if you do it in fractions) miles per minute.
You want to know what it will do in twenty minutes. If it does 1.25 miles in one minute, all you’ve got to do now is multiply by twenty.
20 X 1.25 is 25. Twenty-five miles in twenty minutes.
You could work it backwards too to test your answer. Twenty minutes is a third of an hour. A third of seventy-five is twenty-five. Or to show your working out as they make you do in school:
60 /20 =3 …20 min = 1/3 of an hour.
75/3 = 25…..car travels 25 miles in 20 minutes.
Normally they’re looking to see if you can grasp the idea of finding common units and so the first one is what they’re expecting. On the old O level or CSE the papers would be marked by proper maths teachers who would accept either way but these days they’re often marked by tick-box people and if you don’t follow exactly what’s on their models they might not have the nouse to see that anything else is acceptable. So even though it’s just the same thing they might not realise and you’d lose your working-out marks even though you’ve done it and got the right answer. So go the first way for preference.
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