Question

Sam is using an industrial kitchen to bake several batches of his famous chocolate chip granola bars. He needs

to weigh out 80 ounces of chocolate chips, plus or minus 1.75 ounces. Write and solve an absolute value inequality
that can be used to find the minimum or maximum amount of chocolate chips that he can weigh out?

Answer 1

The minimum amount of chocolate chips Sam can weigh out is 78.25 ounces and the maximum is 81.75 ounces, represented by the absolute value inequality |x – 80| ≤ 1.75, where x is the weight of the chocolate chips.

Step-by-step explanation:

To find the minimum and maximum amount of chocolate chips that Sam can weigh out for his granola bars, we need to write an absolute value inequality. The absolute value inequality takes into account the permissible variation from the desired weight of 80 ounces, which is ±1.75 ounces. Here is how we set up and solve the inequality:

Let x represent the weight of chocolate chips. The inequality is written as |x – 80| ≤ 1.75. To solve the inequality, we break it into two separate inequalities:

x – 80 ≤ 1.75

–(x – 80) ≤ 1.75, which simplifies to 80 – x ≤ 1.75

Solving these, we get:

x ≤ 81.75 ounces

x ≥ 78.25 ounces

Therefore, the minimum amount of chocolate chips Sam can weigh out is 78.25 ounces and the maximum is 81.75 ounces.