Question

Hanna makes her own furniture polish using twenty-five percent vinegar and seventy-five percent olive oil. Write and solve an equation to determine how much total solution she made if she used 2 cups of vinegar. Show your work.

Answer 1

Set y = total solution. Set x = cups of vinegar used. To figure out the rest of the equation, think about the relationship between the amount of vinegar in the solution and how that influences the amount of the entire solution.

Answer 2

Can you explain that a little better?

Answer 3

Well, you are trying to write an equation, yes? So you need to have a value you are finding. Most of the time, we set the value we are looking for (in this case, the amount of the total solution) to y.

Then we have a variable that changes. As the variable changes, it affects y. So we call this variable x. In this case, x is how much vinegar we use. We need to write an equation for how x is related to y.

To figure out this relationship, we need to think about the problem. Since the amount of vinegar is 1/4 of the total solution, for each cup of vinegar we use, how much total solution do we get?