SOLUTION: a car travels 60 mph for 3 hours. how far did the car go? i was just wondering if all you do to solve the question was to multiply 60*3 to get 180

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Question 521213: a car travels 60 mph for 3 hours. how far did the car go? i was just wondering if all you do to solve the question was to multiply 60*3 to get 180
Answer by bucky(2189) About Me  (Show Source):
You can put this solution on YOUR website!
That's correct ... you just multiply 60 times 3 to get the answer 180 miles.
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Something you can do to increase your confidence is to do a check of the units. When you decide to multiply or divide units you can multiply or divide the units as appropriate to ensure that you get the units that you need for the answer.
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For this problem you thought that you might multiply the 60 times the 3 to get an answer of miles. The units for the 60 is miles per hour. (The "per" means "divided by".) The units for the 3 is "hours". So with a units check you multiply miles per 1 hour times 3 hours as follows:
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%28%28miles%29%2F%28hour%29%29+%2A+%28hours%29
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Notice that the hour(s) in the denominator cancels with the hours for the multiplier and you are just left with "miles" that you need for the answer:
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%28%28miles%29%2Fcross%28hour%29%29+%2A%28cross%28hours%29%29+=+miles
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This type of units check is not only useful in math classes, it will be very useful in physics whenever you start transforming from one set of units to another by multiplying and dividing by various conversion factors.
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Hope this helps you in the future.