Jay’s Painting Rate

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How many hours does it take Jay to paint p rooms if he paints at the rate of q rooms per hour?

Review: Jay's Painting Rate


Explanation

We can express Jay's painting rate as a fraction. It's always useful to write the units in the fraction.



We want to know how long it takes to paint p rooms, so we want a fraction like this with p in the numerator, not q. But we don't want to change the value of fraction, because Jay's rate is not changing in this situation. So we can multiply the fraction by 1 in the form of over :



The q's cancel on top and we end up with p rooms, just as we wanted. The time it takes to paint p rooms is evidently hours. We can check that it makes sense by considering a case. If he paints at a rate of q=3 rooms per hour, and he's painting p=9 rooms, then it will take hours to paint nine rooms. It checks out.

The correct answer is (A).


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