Question

You and your classmates create 25 self-portraits to sell at the PTA auction to raise money for your school. In order to pay for the materials you bought to make the self-portraits, you need to sell each of the self-portraits for $2.75. When transporting the self-portraits to the auction, one of your parents accidentally drops four of the self-portraits in the street and they are run over by a Community Transit bus. What is the new minimum price you need to set for the remaining self-portraits in order to pay for the materials?

Answer 1

Let's start with the first part of the problem. There are 25 self-portraits that are planned to be sold at $2.75 each. If that's the case, how much money are they expecting to make (assuming they sell all 25 self-portraits)?

This is:

`2.75\cdot25=68.75`

Once we have found that, now the task is to find out how they can still make that much money with three of the self-portraits now ruined, and only 21 self-portraits left.

If we need to get $68.75 to pay for the materials and we only have 21 self-portraits to sell, we could divide:

`(68.75)/(21)=3.27`

Therefore, the new minimum price we need to set for the remaining self-portraits in order to pay for the materials is $3.27 approximately.