Question

Four workers can harvest a corn field in 12 hours. If the job needs to be completed in 8 hours, how many workers must be assigned to the job? Note: All workers work at the same constant rate.

Answer 1

6

Explanation:

You want to know the number of workers required to harvest a field in 8 hours if 4 workers can do the job in 12 hours.

Effort

Problems like this that involve effort usually measure the effort as a constant product of workers and time.

Here, that product is (4 workers)(12 hours) = 48 worker·hours.

If the same effort is accomplished in 8 hours, the number of workers required is ...

(48 worker·hours)/(8 hours) = 6 workers

6 workers are needed to accomplish the task in 8 hours.