Question

A city places 18 trash cans along a 13.5 miles stretch of beach. The trash cans are placed an equal distance apart. How many miles are in between each trash can?

Answer 1

0.7941 miles

Explanation:

I would think of this situation as a giant ruler.

The 18 trash cans can be thought of as endpoints on intervals in this giant ruler.

1--------2 --------3 --------4-----------5

If you notice the numbers that I wrote, there are five of them, but there are 4 intervals.

So we need to minus one from 18 to get 17 equal length intervals so that the trash cans are equally spaced.

Interval length = 13.5 miles / 17 intervals = 0.7941 miles