A yardstick measures 1/4 by 3 by 36 inches. How many yard sticks will fit in a box 3 inches wide and 36 inches high, if the girth of the box is 30 inches?

Question

aravindg · Answer

what you mean by girth?

anonymous · Answer

Short answer is 48.
How do we get that? Two of the dimensions of the box match the dimensions of the yardstick (the box is 36 inches tall, the yardstick is 36 inches long and the box is 36 inches high; the box and yardstick are both 3 inches wide). This means you have a box in which you can only stack yardsticks on top of each other. 
Now we only need to know the last dimension of the box to find how many yardsticks we can stack up in there. 
We know the girth is 30 inches, and that girth is the perimeter of the cross section of the box. Or in equation form:
30=girth=2*(height+width)
The problem indicates the height is 36 inches, but typically the length is the longest edge of the a box so I will treat 36 inches as the length and the 3 inch side as the width. Then our equation now looks like this.
30=2*(height+3)
After some algebra...
15=height+3
12=height
...we see the height must be 12 inches.
And since the height of each individual yardstick is 1/4 inches, our answer should be 12 divided by 1/4, which is 48 yardsticks.