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Question 466952: a book dealer received an order in which 1/5 of the books were hardcover books. the dealer sold 2/3 of the books, including 3/4 of the hardcover books. What fraction of the unsold books were hardcover books?
Answer by moshiz08(60)   (Show Source):
You can put this solution on YOUR website! Sometimes fractions can be tricky so let's just suppose that the total number of books in the order is 60. Now the question reads:
"a book dealer received an order in which 12 of the books were hardcover books. the dealer sold 40 of the books, including 3/4 of the hardcover books (9 hardcover books). What fraction of the unsold books were hardcover books?
Since 40 books were sold, there are 20 unsold books. How many unsold books are hardcover? There were a total of 12 hardcover books, of which 9 were sold, so there are 3 hardcover books left. Thus the fraction of unsold books which are hardcover is 3/20.
Now you may wonder, why did we pick 60 books? That's the LCM [least common multiple] of 3, 4, and 5, so it was the smallest number we could use so that everything is a whole number.
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