SOLUTION: My last problem, and thank-you very much. An old house has a basement stairway that has steps that are 7.25 inches high and 9 inches across. What is the slope of the stairs?

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Question 596334: My last problem, and thank-you very much.
An old house has a basement stairway that has steps that are 7.25 inches high and 9 inches across. What is the slope of the stairs?
Can this be rounded to a two decimal places?
Answer by bucky(2189) (Show Source):
You can put this solution on YOUR website!
Slope is defined as the change in the vertical rise divided by the corresponding change in the horizontal run.
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The problem tells you that the horizontal change is 9 inches. And for that horizontal change the stair correspondingly rises 7.25 inches. Applying these values to the slope equation we get:
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and when you do the division on the right side, the answer becomes:
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And rounding this answer to two decimal places gives:
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because the rule for rounding to two decimal places tells you to look at the third decimal place and if it is 5 or more, you raise the second decimal place by 1 (in this case, go from zero to 1) and drop everything beyond the second decimal place.
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Some other common ways of expressing this slope in the construction trades would be "81 percent" or "8.1 in 10" meaning that the stairs rise 8.1 inches for every 10 inches they go horizontally.
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I hope this helps you to understand the problem a little more.
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