Question

Brian irons 2/9 of a shirt in 3 3/5 minutes. How long will it take him to iron one shirt? At this rate, how long will it take to iron 5 shirts?

Answer 1

Alright, so since you can't multiply 2/9 into 1 super easily, we could divide it by 2 and multiply it by 9 then to get 1, so that's what we'll do. Since 3+3/5 is
15/5+3/5=18/5 (since 5 goes into 15 3 times), we can divide that by 2 to get 18/2/5=9/5. Multiplying that by 9, we get 9*9/5=81/5=the amount of minutes it would take to iron 1 shirt. Since 5 goes into 80 16 times, we can write 81/5 as 80/5+1/5=16+1/5. In addition, we need to find how long it would take to iron 5 shirts, and to do that we can multiply 1 shirt's time by 5, getting
81*5/5=405/5=81 minutes since 5 goes into 405 81 times.