Question

1.At 8:30am, Student Life had served 37 meals at their pancake breakfast. By 10:15am, thetotal served had reached 77. Find the serving rate, in number of meals per minute. Keep youranswer as a reduced fraction.

Answer 1

We have to estimate a serving rate, with units of "number of meals per minute".

To solve this we have to calculate how many meals have been served in a certain time frame, and estimate a mean service rate.

The time interval we are taking is from 8:30 am to 10:15 am. That is 30 minutes to 9 am, plus 60 minutes to 10 am, plus 15 minutes to 10:15 am.

This is a total of 30+60+15=105 minutes.

The total served at 10:15 am is 77 meals. If we substract the meals that have been already served by 8:30 am, we get that in our time interval 77-37=40 meals have been served.

So we can calculate the serving rate as:

`s=\frac{\text{ \#meals}}{\text{time}}=\frac{40\text{ meals}}{105\text{ min}}=(8)/(21)\text{ meals/min}`

The serving rate, expressed as a reduced fraction (we divide both numerator and denominator by 5), is 8/21 meals per minute.