SOLUTION: If 5 painters can paint a house in 32 hours, how long would it take if there were only 2 painters?

Question 593719: If 5 painters can paint a house in 32 hours, how long would it take if there were only 2 painters?
Answer by bucky(2189) (Show Source): You can put this solution on YOUR website!
This problem can be worked by just thinking about it.
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How many painter hours were spent to paint the house? Each of the 5 painters worked 32 hours on the job. So the painter-hours spent on the job were 5 times the 32 hours and this equals 160 hours of total labor.
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Instead of 5 painters, if only one painter were going to paint the entire house by himself, he would have to do the entire 160 hours of painting by himself to complete the work of the five painters.
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Since two painters are going to work simultaneously to do the 160 hour job, each painter will need to put in 80 hours for the entire job to be finished. So in 80 hours of working together, two painters could do the job.
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Hope this helps you to see how to work this problem.
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As an additional example, you can think about the number of simultaneous hours that it would take for 4 painters to completely paint the house. The answer is 40 hours ... and as you might suspect, just slightly longer than the 32 hours it would take for five painters.
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