Question

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE HELP ASAP! A rectangle was enlarged by a scale factor of 5/2 and the new width is 40 cm. What was the original width?

Answer 1

16 cm

Explanation:

Suppose that x is the original width. If that original width is enlarged by a scale factor 5/2 that means that x is multiplied by 5/2 and after that multiplication we obtained new width, 40 cm.

Therefore,

x*(5/2) = 40

We multiply the equation by 2 and obtain:

x*5 = 40*2

5x = 80

Now we divide the equation by 5 and obtain:

x = 80/5

x = 16

We obtained that x, the original width was 16 cm