Question

Please help me as fast as possible!

A tortoise and hare decide to race 30 feet. The hare, being much faster, decides to give
the tortoise a 20 feet head start. The tortoise runs at 0.5 feet/sec and the hare runs at
5.5 feet/second. How long (in seconds) until the hare catches the tortoise?

Answer 1

Answer:
4 seconds

Step-by-step explanation:
If they’re going to meet at a certain point, the hate and the tortoise would have raced the same distance up until that point. So we can lay the equation like this:

The distance the tortoise crawled=the distance the hare hopped

Another important formula that we must know to solve this equation is:

Distance=time*speed

Because what we don’t know and want to solve for is the TIME, we can set our variable as t.

The equation now:

[tortoise speed]*t+20ft=[hare speed)*t

We add 20ft on the left because the hare gave the tortoise a head start.

When we input all the values, the final equation is:

0.5t+20=5.5t

The process of solving it is in the picture below.

I hope this helped (at least a little haha, this is a pretty confusing question)