guest22 Wrote:One night a certain motel rented 3/4 of its rooms, including 2/3 of its air-conditioned rooms. If 3/5 of its rooms were air-conditioned, what percent of the rooms that were not rented were air-conditioned?
(A) 20%
(B) 3331%
(C) 35%
(D) 40%
(E) 80%
Could you do this by plugging in a number? I chose 65 as the total number of rooms..and created the double set table.
But then I didn't know what the 3/5 was referring to. Does it mean 3/5 of its total or 3/5 of the rooms that are currently being rented out?
wow, 65 is a really weird number for the total. why 65? did you think there was a 13 somewhere in the problem?
it's probably easier to use 60, since that's divisible by 3, 4, and 5. as you'll see, it turns out that you're not dealing with thirds of the original number, so divisibility by 3 is irrelevant; however, it's certainly not reasonable to expect that degree of insight from a single glance at the denominators.
pick a number that's compatible with the denominators in the problem. since 65 isn't divisible by 4, that's a bad number to pick.
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if there are 60 rooms total, then the motel rented 45 rooms. this means that
15 of the rooms were not rented.
also, 3/5 of 60, or 36, rooms have aircon; the motel rented 2/3 of these, or 24, rooms. this means that
12 rooms with aircon weren't rented.
12 out of 15 = 80%.
you can put these data into the double-set matrix, which will almost certainly speed the calculations.