Question

A store sold 2.5 times as many footballs as basketballs last year. What is the number of footballs sold for every basketball sold

Answer 1

Explanation:

You aren't able to figure out an exact number of either footballs or basketballs because you don't have enough information for that, but you do have enough to get an expression for one in terms of the other, which I imagine is the point here. We know that for every 1 basketball sold, we sold 2.5 footballs, so the algebraic expression for that is

1 bball = 2.5 fballs

This gives us the number of bballs in terms of fballs but we want the number of fballs in terms of bballs, so solve that expression for fballs:

1 fball = 1/2.5 bballs

or, in words, for every single football sold, 2/5 of a basketball was sold. Sounds silly, but I think your teacher is trying to get you to figure out how to express one thing in terms of another so you can use the expressions in solving story problems.

:/