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Welcome to our Math lesson on Substituting in Formulas derived from Wordy Problems, this is the fifth lesson of our suite of math lessons covering the topic of Writing Formulas and Substituting in a Formula, you can find links to the other lessons within this tutorial and access additional Math learning resources below this lesson.
Wordy problems contain the necessary information to produce one or more formula; you just have to identify the variables participating in the event. This is similar to the mining process used to extract minerals from the Earth core. Then, you can write the equations and apply the same procedure as the one explained earlier.
The ratio of Laura's trophies to Anne's trophies is 7:4. The difference between the numbers is 12. What are the numbers?
This is a problem involving ratios, for which we have discussed in chapter 4. We can use a common factor k to reduce the number of variables in the formula. Thus, instead of writing
where L is for Laura and A for Anne, we write instead
so,
In addition, we have
Therefore, the formula used in this problem is
It helps calculate the common factor k, i.e.
Now, we can find the number of trophies won by each girl. Thus, for Laura, we have
and for Anne, we have
Let's consider another wordy problem including banking.
A customer deposits $15,000 in a bank that applies compound interest rates. If the interest rate is 0.8% and it is compound twice a year, calculate the total amount the customer will have in his savings account after four years.
We have explained the compound interest formula
in tutorial 5.4, where
An (t) → the amount of deposit after t years;
P → principal (original deposit);
r → interest rate expressed as a decimal (here r = 0.8% = 0.8/100 = 0.008);
n → number of compounds in a year; and
t → time of deposit (in years)
In our example, we have the following values:
In this way, we obtain for the amount the customer will have in his savings account after four years:
Thus, the customer will have $15,486.75 in his savings account after four years of deposit.
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