Question

shea is making costumes for the school play. she has 14 feet of ribbon. she needs to cut pieces that are 3/5 feet long. how many full pieces can shea cut. how much will she have leftover

Answer 1

how many full pieces can shea cut?
For this case what you should do is divide the amount of ribbons you have between the length of each piece, which in this case is 3/5 feet long.
Doing the division we have:
(14) / (3/5) = 23,333 pieces.
therefore she can cut 23 complete pieces
how much will she have leftover?
The amount of excess tape in this case will be given by
(3/5) * (0.333) = 0.1998 ft.

Answer 2

This is best solved by converting 14 ft to an improper fraction of fifths of a foot. We do this by multiplying by a fraction of one with the desired denominator, 5/5. This gives us a starting amount of ribbon of 70/5 which makes the 3/5 size easier to work with. Since the denominators match, dividing the numerators will tell how many pieces can be cut. 70/3 is 23 with a remainder of 1. Shea will have 23 pieces of length 3/5 ft and a piece leftover with a length of 1/5 ft.