Question

Medication is prescribed in 5 out of every 10 hospital emergency room visits thatinvolve an injury. If a large urban hospital had 950 emergency room visitsinvolving an injury in the past month, how many of these visits would you expectincluded a prescription for medication?

Answer 1

475

1) If 5 out of 10 patients receive medication, then we have this ratio:

`(5)/(10)=(1)/(2)=0.5`

2) If 950 patients go to the hospital for the same reason, we can write out the following ratios to get to know what we expect:

`\begin{gathered} (1)/(2)=(x)/(950) \\ 2x=950 \\ (2x)/(2)=(950)/(2) \\ x=475 \end{gathered}`

Note that we could cross multiply those ratios.

3) Hence, we can expect that 475 people receive a prescription for medication.