Question

An artist wants to reduce the size of a drawing using a scale factor of 3:13:1 . The original drawing has an area of 720 square inches. What is area of the new drawing? Enter your answer in the box.

Answer 1

Answer: 80

MsEHolt is correct, the answer is 80$in^2$

Answer 2

When shrinking an image, the size of each side is shrunk by the scale factor.  However the area is not shrunk by the same factor.  Area is a squared measurement (when finding the area of a rectangle we take length x width; two measurements, so a squared answer), so the area will be shrunk by the scale factor squared; in this case the area is shrunk by 3² or 9.  This means the new area would be 720/9 or 80 square inches.