Question

2. Janice and Jasmine were each given a piece of ribbon of equal length. Janice cuts her ribbons into equal lengths of 2 m, while Jasmine cuts her ribbons into equal lengths of 5 m. If there was no remainder in both cases, find the shortest possible length of ribbon given to them.

Answer 1

10m.

Explanation:

Since there is no remainder we simply need to find the least common multiple of each of the lengths of Janice and Jasmin's strings until we find a multiple that matches for each. Like so...

2*1 = 2 5*1 = 5

2*2 = 4 5*2 = 10

2*3 = 6

2*4 = 8

2*5 = 10

Finally, we have found the first common multiple which is 10m. That means that the shortest equal length for both Janice's and Jasmin's ribbon is 10m.