Question

In a mall, 1/15 of the stores sell shoes. There are 180 stores in the mall. How many of the stores sell shoes?

Answer 1

`x=12`

Explanation:

A ratio question! Let's look first at what we're trying to find.

We have a mall and the mall has 180 stores. We want to know how many of them sell shoes. What we're told is that `1/15` of them do - so in essence, we're given the reduced fraction, and we're asked to find the unreduced fraction. So we can say this:

`"reduced fraction"="unreduced fraction"`

`1/15=x/180`

We can now proceed a few different ways. One way is to cross-multiply the fractions, so we'd get:

`15x=180`

`x=12`

Another way we could go would be to multiply the fraction on the left by a form of 1 to make it equal the right:

`1/15=1/15(1)=1/15(12/12)=12/180` and so we know that `x=12` (this method only works well if we know that x is an integer!)