|
Question 118050: The following pie chart represents the way a new company ships its goods. Use the information presented to complete the question.
pie chart second day air freight 40%, next day air freight 15%, truck 45%
If the company shipped a total of 550 items last month, how many were shipped using second-day air freight?
Answer by bucky(2189)   (Show Source):
You can put this solution on YOUR website! As a "safety" feature, the first thing to do would be to add up the percentages given on
the pie chart and ensure that they total 100%. You will note that 40% plus 15% plus 45% does
sum to 100% ... so that's OK. All the shipping possibilities have been accounted for in the three
groupings of shipments.
.
There are several ways you can look at this problem. You could set it up as a proportion.
Since the problem tells you that second-day air freight is what you are interested, you
can concentrate on the 40% that is the percent of the total shipments that go by that method.
.
40% is equivalent to the fraction  ... that's a basic definition of percent ...
each percent equals  so that 40% is  . This
means that if you had a total of 100 items, 40 of them would go by second-day air freight.
.
With that information the proportion becomes:
.
.
This tells you that 40 (the number of items that go) out of each 100 items (the total number of
items) is the general ratio. The corresponding ratio on the other side of this proportion
has to have the corresponding form ... the numerator being the actual number of items being
shipped and the denominator being the total number of items. Since the number of items actually
being shipped is unknown, it is represented by X, and the total number of items involved is
550 and it is the denominator.
.
One way to solve proportions is to begin by cross multiplying. Multiply the numerator on
one side by the denominator on the other side of the equal sign. Do this for both numerators
in the proportion. Separate the two products by an equal sign, and solve the equation.
.
In this problem you would multiply the 40 on one side by the 550 on the other side to get:
.
.
Then multiply the other numerator, that is X, by the denominator on the other side, that is 100.
When you do that multiplication you get 
.
Separate the two products by an equal sign and you have:
.
.
Solve for X by dividing both sides by 100, the multiplier of the X:
.
.
The left side becomes just X and the on the right side you cancel two zeros in the denominator
with two zeros in the numerator to get just 220.
.
So the answer to this problem is X (the unknown number of items that shipped out of 550 items)
is equal to 220 items going by second-day air freight.
.
Another way you could have solved this problem is to recognize that 40% is equivalent
to 0.40 in decimal form. Then you could have just multiplied 0.40 times 550 and immediately
have the answer of 220 second day air freight shipments.
.
Hope this helps you to understand the concept of percent a little better.
.
|
|
|
| |
