Answer:
A picture that is 46cm by 32 cm must fit in a space that is 3m by 2m
First, let's rewrite both of these dimensions in the same units.
Knowing that:
1m = 100cm
Then the dimensions of the space can be rewritten from:
3m by 2m
to:
300cm by 200cm
So, if we enlarge our original picture by a scale factor K, the new dimensions of the picture will be:
K*46cm by K*32cm
Now we just need to find a value of K such that:
K*46cm is something near to 300cm
K*32cm is something near to 200cm
First, we can solve the equation:
K*46cm = 300cm
solving this for K we get:
K = 300cm/46cm = 6.5
While if we solve the equation:
K*32cm = 200cm
we get:
K = 200cm/32cm = 6.25
So we got two possible scale factors.
Which one we should take?
Notice that if we wanted to use the larger one (K = 6.5) for the 32cm side. the new length would be:
32cm*6.5 = 208cm
This is larger than the 200cm of space that we have
Then we can not select the larger option, we can only take the other value:
K = 6.25
Then we can conclude that a reasonable scale factor to use is K = 6.25
exists.