Question

Jaclyn gets a hit 40% of the time while playing softball. She is going to use colored tiles to simulate her chances of getting a hit. Green tiles will represent hits, while red tiles will represent times Jaclyn does not get a hit. She will place the tiles in a bag, and then draw the tiles from the bag one at a time. Jaclyn places 12 green tiles in a bag. How many red tiles should she place in the bag?

Answer 1

18 red tiles

Explanation:

One way to look at this problem would be to take the number of tiles that Jaclyn used to get a possibility of 40% hits.

Jaclyn put 12 green tiles, this represents the 40% of the hits that she could get.

Now we know that 12 = 40%

We need to find how many red tiles she should put to still keep the 12 green tiles as 40%. We can also assume that 12 red tiles would be another 40%.

So we have 12 red tiles currently.

Now we still have another 20% left.

Since 12 red tiles = 40%, we can assume that:

6 red tiles = 20% of the total.

So if we add both the 40% red tiles to the 20% red tiles we get:

12 + 6 = 18 red tiles.

So Jaclyn will have to put 18 red tiles and 12 green tiles to simulate her chances of getting a hit.