latoya is riding her bicycle. She rides 19.2 kilometers in 3 hours. What is her speed?
Accepted Solution
A:
Since we want the unit speed (kilometers per hour, or 1 hour), we want to find the rate of kilometers to hours. We have 19.2 kilometers, and 3 hours, but we want to get to 1 hour. To get that, we can simply make it a fraction (“per” is a key word for a fraction) to get 19.2 km/3 hours. Dividing both the numerator and denominator by 3 to get 1 hour (this works due to that since we’re dividing both by 3, we’re essentially multiplying by 1, and we can multiply by 1 using identity properties. To elaborate, if we have (x/y)/(a/y), with y being the same number, we can make it into a multiplication problem by switching the numerator and denominator of the bottom function to get (x/y)*(y/a)=x/y), we get 19.2/3=6.4 and 3/3=1. Therefore, as we have 6.4 kilometers/1 hour, Latoya’s speed is 6.4 kilometers per hour.