SOLUTION: A recipe calls for 1 1/3 cups tomato sauce. If Julia needs 2 1/2 times more servings of tomato sauce then the recipe makes how many cups of tomato sauce should she use? Show your w

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Question 1066631: A recipe calls for 1 1/3 cups tomato sauce. If Julia needs 2 1/2 times more servings of tomato sauce then the recipe makes how many cups of tomato sauce should she use? Show your work
Answer by swincher4391(1107) (Show Source):
You can put this solution on YOUR website!
There are really two ideas here at play.
First, you need to convert the mixed fraction to an improper fraction.
So 1 1/3 cups of tomato sauce is really like 3/3 cups + another 1/3 cups. So 4/3 cups. And similarly, if Julia needs 2 1/2 times more, then she needs 4/2 + 1/2 times more... or 5/2.
So now that we have 1 1/3 = 4/3
and 2 1/2 = 5/2, we can now multiply the improper fractions together.
Remember that it is a matter of just multiplying numerators and denominators and then simplifying the fraction.
So
We are almost done, but we need to get the fraction back to a mixed number since that was the format we were given.
First off, 20/6 can be reduced to 10/3. If we divide 3 into 10 we get 3 with a remainder of 1. So, the answer is 3 1/3 cups of tomato sauce. You can also think of 10/3 as 9/3 + 1/3, so 3 1/3.