Question

A city employee paints curbs in parking lots and replaces road signs. It takes 0.5 hour to paint a parking lot curb and 2.5 hours to replace a road sign. The function below can be used to find c, the number of parking lot curbs the employee paints when he replaces r road signs in a 40-hour workweek.

If the employee painted 20 curbs in one week, how many road signs did he replace that week?

Answer 1

The employee replaced 12 road signs in one week.

Step-by-step explanation:

To determine the number of road signs the employee replaced in a 40-hour workweek, we can first calculate the number of parking lot curbs painted using the given information.

Let c be the number of parking lot curbs and r be the number of road signs replaced. According to the function, c = (40 - 2.5r) / 0.5.

If the employee painted 20 curbs in one week, we can substitute c with 20 in the equation and solve for r.

20 = (40 - 2.5r) / 0.5

Multiplying both sides by 0.5 gives us 10 = 40 - 2.5r.

Subtracting 40 from both sides gives us -30 = -2.5r.

Dividing both sides by -2.5 gives us r = 12.

Therefore, the employee replaced 12 road signs in one week.