Question

How many killer whales are there when there are 5 million beluga whales

Answer 1

We know that the number of og beluga whales varies directly as the number of killer whales, that means that we can write a relation of the form:

`y=kx`

where y is the number of beluga whales, x is the number of killer whales and k is the constant of proportionality.

To answer the question we first need to find k, to do that we plug the values x=23 and y=14 in the equation above and solve for k:

`\begin{gathered} 14=k23 \\ k=(14)/(23) \end{gathered}`

Now that we know k the relation is:

`y=(14)/(23)x`

Finally to find the number of killer whales if there are 5 millions of beluga whales we plug y=5 in the equation above and solve for x:

`\begin{gathered} 5=(14)/(23)x \\ x=(5\cdot23)/(14) \\ x=8.21 \end{gathered}`

Therefore when there are 5 millions beluga whales we have 8.21 millions of killer whales.