A killer whale has eaten 75 pounds of fish today. It needs to eat at least 140 pounds of fish each day. A bucket holds 15 pounds of fish. Write and solve an inequality that represents how many more buckets of fish the whale needs to eat?
75 + 15x >= 140
5,270 feet in a mike
To solve this problem, we need to find out how many more buckets of fish the killer whale needs to eat. Let's begin by finding the total amount of fish the whale has eaten so far.
The killer whale has eaten 75 pounds of fish today. To find out how many buckets of fish this represents, we can divide the amount of fish by the capacity of each bucket.
Each bucket holds 15 pounds of fish, so we can divide 75 by 15:
75 pounds / 15 pounds = 5 buckets
Therefore, the killer whale has eaten the equivalent of 5 buckets (75 pounds) of fish so far.
Now, let's figure out how many more buckets the whale needs to eat to meet the daily requirement of 140 pounds of fish.
Since each bucket holds 15 pounds, we can divide the desired amount of fish by the capacity of each bucket:
140 pounds / 15 pounds = 9.33 buckets (rounded to two decimal places)
Since we cannot have a fraction of a bucket, we need to round up to the nearest whole number. Therefore, the whale needs to eat at least 10 buckets of fish to meet its daily requirement.
To represent this situation as an inequality, we can use the variable "x" to represent the number of additional buckets the whale needs to eat. The inequality can be written as:
5 buckets + x ≥ 10 buckets
This inequality states that the sum of the buckets the whale has already eaten (5 buckets) plus the number of additional buckets it needs to eat (x) must be greater than or equal to 10 buckets. This ensures that the whale meets or exceeds the daily requirement of 140 pounds of fish.