Do you ever get sick of doing homework? That's how I felt today! I was having a hard time focusing on my homework and I kept getting distracted! Some of the problems took a long time which made it worse! haha. I even had to watch videos to help me. I didn't even know there were videos!
One problem that I didn't know how to start asked to estimate the total amount of deer in a game preserve. It said that a forest ranger caught 250 deer, tagged them, and released them. Later 105 deer were caught and only 36 of those were tagged. Estimate how many deer there are total in the preserve. Well I was stumped! I had to watch a video, but I figured it out!
You have to set up a proportion. On one side of the equal sign you take the total number of marked deer caught over the total number of marked deer which was (36/250). For the other side of the proportion, you take the number of deer caught over the number of total deer in the reserve which was (105/x). So the problem now looks like:
36/250=105/x
Then you have to solve for 'x' by cross multiplying. So you get:
36x=26250
Then you divide by 36 on both sides to find 'x'.
x=729.166667 which rounds to about 729 total deer in the preserve.
So the problem stumped me at first, but once I knew how to set up the problem, it was a piece of cake! Most of the problems are like that, I just need to figure out the first step!
This LINK will help you understand better by walking you through a 'fish pond' example step by step! Or click HERE for an experiment to go with it (More interactive and fun looking) (It is a PDF download).
I think you explained how to do the problem well. I've used the video option once and it came in handy. The most effective option for me though seems to be working through an example of the problem. For some reason, I actually enjoy doing the math homework for this class. But maybe I'm just a nerd :P
ReplyDelete