|
Question 542446: Copier A can make 300 photocopies of a page in 15 minutes.Copier B can do the same job in 12 minutes.If both copiers will work together,how long will it take them to do the job?
Answer by neatmath(302)   (Show Source):
You can put this solution on YOUR website!
This is a fairly standard "rate of work" problem.
The standard way to solve these is using this formula:
where A is the time taken by A, B is the time taken by B, and T is the time taken when they work together.
This can also be extended to more than two different workers, machines, etc.
So in our case, time A is 15, and time B is 12. Let's solve:
Find a common denominator of 15 and 12 (it's 60):
 which is about 6.667 minutes which makes sense!
********************************************************************
More information:
Notice that we didn't use the fact about the 300 pages?
The important thing is that copier A and B both did the exact same job.
We would have a LITTLE more work to do if the jobs were different.
In that case we would just need to convert one of the jobs so that it was the equivalent of the other one.
For example if it said copier A did 300 pages in 12 minutes, and copier B did 900 pages in 60 minutes,
we would need to convert A to 900 pages, or convert B to 300 pages.
I would convert copier A to 900 pages by multiplying both values by 3.
Hence, copier A could do 900 pages in 36 minutes.
Then we could proceed with the problem once again as we did above.
I hope this helps!
|
|
|
| |
