Question

Three sizes of popcorn buckets are on sale at a movie theatre. The large bucket holds 15 1/2 cups of popcorn. The medium bucket holds 1/3 of the amount of the large bucket. The small bucket holds 2/4 of the amount of the medium bucket. How many cups does the medium bucket hold?

Answer 1

Answer:

The medium bucket can hold 5 and 1/6 cups of popcorn.

Step-by-step explanation:

Remember that for mixed numbers, like "4 and 1/5", the way of writing that number is (4 + 1/5).

Now, let's solve the question:

We know that the large bucket holds (15 + 1/2) cups.

We also know that the medium bucket holds 1/3 of the large bucket, and we want to know how many cups does the medium bucket hold.

This is just (1/3) times the amount that the large bucket holds, so we have:

(1/3)*(15 + 1/2) cups

Using the product distributivity, we can write:

(1/3)*(15 + 1/2) cups = ( (1/3)*15 + (1/3)*(1/2) ) cups = (5 + 1/6) cups

Then we can conclude that the medium bucket can hold 5 and 1/6 cups of popcorn.