Question

Hannah's hourly wage at the ice cream shop is $5.85. The table shows the number of hours she worked. She estimates her earnings to be $120. Without calculating her actual earnings, determine if her estimate is more or less than her actual earnings. Explain your reasoning.

Answer 1

If you don't want to compute Hannah's actual earning, you can just find a representative value for all the days. It can be the mean, median or mode. The easiest parameter that you can obtain without calculating is the media. Arrange the number of hours from least to greatest;

2.5   3.5   3.75   4.25   4.75

The median is 3.75. Assuming this is the number of hours for each day for 5 days, the estimated cost is:

Estimated Cost = 3.75*5*$5.85 = $109.7

Therefore, Hannah's estimate is more than the estimated cost.