SOLUTION: Hello Please help me solve this problem Kalli is making small bowls of nuts for a party. Each bowl uses 1/4 cup of nuts. Kalli has 3 3/8 cups of nuts. How many bowls of nuts

Algebra ->  Percentage-and-ratio-word-problems -> SOLUTION: Hello Please help me solve this problem Kalli is making small bowls of nuts for a party. Each bowl uses 1/4 cup of nuts. Kalli has 3 3/8 cups of nuts. How many bowls of nuts      Log On


   

Question 295803: Hello
Please help me solve this problem
Kalli is making small bowls of nuts for a party. Each bowl uses 1/4 cup of nuts. Kalli has 3 3/8 cups of nuts. How many bowls of nuts can she make?

I tried dividing, multiplying and even subtrating 1/4 from the total untill I got 0 but I can not seem to get a reasonable answer.
Thank you
Answer by richwmiller(17219) About Me  (Show Source):
You can put this solution on YOUR website!
Let's use easier numbers to get the concept
If I have 1 cups of nuts and I need 1/4 cup for my mix how many mixes can I make.
I think you can see it is 4
so what do you do to go from 1/4 and 1 to get 4
there are two ways
1/(1/4)=4
but sneakily if I take the reciprocal of 1/4 which is 4 and multiply it by 1 also gets 4.
Multiplying by a numbers reciprocal is the same as dividing by the number.
6 divided by 3 is the same as 6*1/3.
It also works the other way
6/(1/3)=6*3=18
So 1/(1/4)=1*4
now back to the original problem
we want to divide 3 3/8 by 1/4
so we can multiply by 4
There are two ways to do this do. (In math there are always several ways to do anything).
4*3=12
]4 *3/8=12/8=1 /12
12+1 1/2=13 1/2
the other way is convert 3 3/8 to an improper fraction
8*3=24
24+3=27
27/8
27/8*4=27/2=13 1/2
answer 13 1/2 or 13.5