Question

Okay so word problems make me very nervous and I tend to over-think them ALWAYS. Parking in a student lot costs $1 for the first half hr, and $1.25 for each hr thereafter. A partial hr is charged the same as a full hr.
If the student has $10, how long can he park in the lot?

Answer 1

This sounds like a problem Ive seen on mymathlab where the instructions made no sense, lol.

Answer 2

I would interpret it that the first hour charges you a dollar. Then the timer resets and you won't get charged again for another full hour (or a total of an hour and a half elapsed time). So 3o mins in you're down to 9 dollars. So you divided the remaining 9 hours to get 7.2 hours. Well, you're not allowed to do .2 hours, 7.2 is the same as 8 in this problem. So the maximum you can stay on that remaining 9 dollars is 7 hours. Then tack on the initial 30 mins and that would be 7.5 hours. But I remember a problem just like this before and neither me nor the person I was working with interpreted it correctly, lol.

Answer 3

Yeah, that is 7.5

Answer 4

Let's try to prove it mathematically:
Subtract the payment from 1st (1/2)hr. That is, 10-1 = 9
Then, let's compute for the next hours possible:
1.25h = 9
h = 7.2
But it was stated that partial hour is charged same as the full hour so disregard .2

Therefore, total hrs = 7+0.5
That is, 7.5 hrs

Answer 5

Actually it must be 7(1.25) +1 well anyway it doesn't reach 10$.
It doesn't matter whether the total amount didn't reached 10$ because it is stated that for any partial hr, the cost will be 1.25$ as well. That's why the excess 0.2 hrs in our solution was disregarded.

Answer 6

You better get the LCD first and convert all those fractional coefficient into whole number.