Clark wants to figure how many pens to order for the office there are 36 workers and he needs to order one pen for each worker. He knows that for every three people who prefer red there are nine who prefer blue how many blue pens should he order
To determine how many blue pens Clark should order, we need to find the number of workers who prefer blue.
Let's break down the information we have:
- There are 36 workers in total.
- For every three people who prefer red, there are nine who prefer blue.
To find the number of workers who prefer blue, we need to divide the total number of workers by the ratio of blue preference to red preference.
The ratio of blue preference to red preference is 9:3, which simplifies to 3:1. This means that for every 3 workers, 1 prefers blue.
Therefore, we divide the total number of workers (36) by 3 to determine the number of groups of 3 workers:
36 ÷ 3 = 12
Now we know that we have 12 groups of 3 workers.
Since each group of 3 workers has 1 worker who prefers blue, we can multiply the number of groups (12) by the number of workers who prefer blue in each group (1) to find the total number of workers who prefer blue:
12 × 1 = 12
Therefore, Clark should order 12 blue pens for the office.
red : blue = 3 : 9 = 1 : 3 or x : 3x
x + 3x = 36
x = 9
number of blue = 3x = 27
number of red = x = 9
notice 9+27 = 36 and 9:27 = 3:9 , as stated