Question

If the amount of waking time 4 year old children spend with their fathers each day is 42 minutes while the daily waking time spent in daycare is 6 hours, what is the ratio of time with father to time in daycare?

Answer 1

7/60

Explanation:

Because the question is phrased such that it asks "the ratio of time with father to....", we know to put the time with father on top, or first. Similarly, since it is asked to put the ratio of time with the father to the time in daycare, we can put the daycare amount second/on the bottom. Therefore, we can write the ratio as

(42 minutes)/(6 hours)

To make both of these in terms of minutes to simplify it, we know that 60 minutes = 1 hour, so 1 hour / 60 minutes =1 . Since multiplying something by 1 keeps it the same, we can multiply our ratio by this amount. We want to multiply with the hour on top so the hours cancel out, as so:

`(42 minutes)/(6 hours) * (1 hour)/(60 minutes) = (42 minutes * hours)/(360 minutes * hours) = (42)/(360)`

To simplify this even further, we can note that 6 is a factor of both 42 and 360*, so we can multiply this fraction by (1/6) / (1/6) to get

(42/360) * (1/6)/(1/6) = 7/60 as our final answer

If this doesn't come up immediately, you can always find the greatest common factor by listing the factors of each number and finding the highest one that fits both, e.g.

for 42: 42, 21, 14, 7 , 6...

for 360: 360,180, ... 6,5....