Bill has 12 hours available to study for his final exams in history and psychology. He decides that he needs to spend twice as much time studying for history as for psychology. How long should he study
How would I even begin to solve this...I am not good with word problems. Thank you
okay, i don't know how you would set this up, but he needs to spend 8 hours on history and 4 hours on psychology. 8+4 equals 12!
Don't be scared by word problems...just take what you know and plug it into an equation.
Twice as long for history as psych, so psych will be X and history will be 2X. You know the total is 12 hours, therefore the equation will be 2X + X = 12.
Combine like terms...3X = 12.
So X = 4 (psych) and 2X = 8 (history)
To solve this problem, it's helpful to break it down step by step.
Let's assign variables to the unknowns in the problem. Let's say 'x' represents the amount of time Bill spends studying for psychology.
According to the problem, he decides to spend twice as much time studying for history as for psychology. Therefore, the amount of time he spends studying for history would be 2 times 'x', or 2x.
Now, we know that Bill has a total of 12 hours available to study. So, the equation would look like this:
x + 2x = 12
Combining the 'x' terms on the left side of the equation, we get:
3x = 12
To find the value of 'x', we can divide both sides of the equation by 3:
3x/3 = 12/3
x = 4
Now that we have the value of 'x', which represents the time Bill spends studying for psychology, we can substitute it back into the equation to find the time he spends studying history:
2x = 2 * 4 = 8
Therefore, Bill should study psychology for 4 hours and history for 8 hours.
To summarize:
Psychology: 4 hours
History: 8 hours