Sam needs to cut a piece of sheet metal into 8 pieces, it takes 5 minutes to cut, how many cuts will he make.

show your work

To cut a piece of sheet metal into 8 pieces, Sam will need to make a total of 7 cuts.

Explanation:

Each cut will result in dividing the sheet metal into 2 pieces. Since Sam needs to end up with 8 pieces, he will need to divide it into 2 pieces at each cut until he reaches the desired number of pieces.

To make 8 pieces, Sam will need to make 7 cuts.

To find the number of cuts Sam will make, we need to determine how many cuts are required to create 8 pieces.

To start, we know that 1 cut will result in 2 pieces. Therefore, Sam will need to make (8 - 1) cuts in order to create 8 pieces.

Since each cut takes 5 minutes, Sam will need to make (8 - 1) cuts * 5 minutes/cut = 7 cuts * 5 minutes/cut = 35 minutes.

Therefore, Sam will make 7 cuts in order to create 8 pieces.

This is actually a trick question if you were to take this question head on. Say for instance you are cutting all the pieces from the same sheet of metal, the equation would NOT be 8 times 5 equals 40 minutes, but rather 7 times 5 equals 35 minutes. this is because on the 7th cut, it takes that from 6 sheets of metal to 8 because you get 2 from that cut. Take for instence, a Hersheys candy bar. It is 3 bars thick, but it only takes 2 breaks to sever the 3 strips. So, that being said, sam will make 7 cuts and those 7 cuts will make a times of 35 minutes.