How to Solve Mixture Word Problems Washington DC

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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