How to Solve Mixture Word Problems Saint Louis MO

Steps

1. Organize your information. Generally, you have three percentages, two unknown amounts, and one known amount. The usual overall structure is:
2. Decide which information represents the final strength & amount. In our example, the final product is supposed to be 5 liters of 18% salt solution.
3. Substitute the information regarding the final strength & amount.
4. Substitue the other two percentages. It doesn't matter which one you put for A and which for B.
5. Choose a variable for one of the unknown amounts. It doesn't matter which one you choose. For this problem, we choose x to represent the amount of 20% solution.
6. Express the amount of the other solution to use. Since we know that the amounts have to add up to 5 liters, and we've already chosen x for the 20% solution, the amount of the other solution is 5 - x .
7. Finish the multiplication that's after the equals sign.
8. Distribute the multiplication over the quantity 5 - x.
9. Solve the rest of the equation.
10. Interpret the answer. We chose the 20% to go with the x, so the fact that x = 3 means we need 3 liters of the 20% solution. The final amount was supposed to be 5 liters. So that leaves 2 liters for the other one, which was the 15% solution.
11. Write out your final response. In this case, we would write: Hypatia will need 3 liters of the 20% solution and 2 liters of the 15% solution in order to get 5 liters of an 18% solution.

Things You'll Need

• The ability to solve a simple algebra equation (e.g. 0.20*x + 0.15*(1-x)=0.18)

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