Question

A carpenter needs to make 60 dowels. Each dowel must be 6 inches long. The wood from which the carpenter will cut the dowels comes in 4-foot lengths. What is the least number if 4-foot lengths of wood the carpenter can buy and still make all 60 dowels?

Answer 1

In order to make 60 dows with 6 inches he'll need 8 woods with 4 foot length each.

Explanation:

Since the carpenter need to make 60 dowels he'll need at least 60*6 = 360 inches of wood. Since each wood comes in 4 foot = 4*12 = 48 inches long, to find out how many of these woods he'll need we'll divide the amount of material he needs by the lenght of individual pieces of wood he can buy. So we have:

number of woods = length of material needed / length of the wood

number of woods = 360 / 48 = 7.5

Since he can't have half wood he'll need to buy 8 woods.

Answer 2

If fraction is sold, then it is 7.5

If they sell no fractions, least amount would be 8

Explanation:

In this question, we are trying to calculate the least amount of a particular length of wood that would be enough to make a particular number of dowels.

Firstly, we should notice we have a unit problem. This is the sense that the metric units are not the same all over. Let’s calculate the total length of dowels he has to make. That will be 6 inches * 60 = 360 inches length.

Now, we need to know the amount of wood that is to be bought. The wood comes in 4-foot length. If we recall, 12 inches makes one foot. This means the length of wood she is to buy would be 12 * 4 = 48 inches length of wood.

Now to know the meat number of wood of 4-inches length she is to buy, what we do is to divide 360 by 48 = 360/48 = 7.5.

Hence, the least number of 4-length wood she is to buy is 7.5

Note: if they won’t sell a fraction, then the least amount to be bought would be 8