Math

Solving Proportions

Jose Hernandez

MAT222: Week 1 Assignment

Professor Eliza Osae-Kwapong

March 9, 2014

Solving Proportions

For this week’s assignment we are given the task of learning how to solve proportions. This is highly important because one may not realize, but everyone uses a proportion at one point or another because it helps one figure out prices or measurements. It is helpful to understand for real life scenarios and of course for this week’s assignment.

According to our textbook “Bear population. To estimate the size of the bear population on the Keweenaw Peninsula, conservationists captured, tagged, and released 50 bears. One year later, a random sample of 100 bears included only 2 tagged bears. What is the conservationist’s estimate of the size of the bear population?” (Dugopolski, 2012). In order to solve the proportion we needed to gather some of the information provided number of the tagged bears compared to the size equals the number of tagged bears in the population at Keweenaw Peninsula. The population size in order to determine this will be “x”, In order to figure out this proportion we must solve for “x”. Our problem is set up as follows:

2 / 100 = 50/x. In order to solve this we must cross multiply or the extreme-means formula. After this is done we are left with 2x = 5000. In order to solve for “x” we must divide both sides by 2. After this is complete we are left with x=2500 bears. The conservationist’s estimate of the size of the bear population is 2500 bears.

We were also given the task this week to complete problem 10 on page 444 of our textbook Elementary and Intermediate Algebra. For problem 10 we are to solve the equation for y:

y-1/x+3 = -3/4

In order to solve this problem we will look into cross multiplying or the extreme-means formula. When we cross multiply this problem we get the following:

4(y-1) = -3(x+3)...