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.