Math Awareness Month

Math Awareness Month
Week One Solutions

April 4, 2011

You are working as an accountant. You are paid $150 every time that you prepare someone’s taxes. Your goal is to earn $60,000 preparing taxes.

1. How many people do you need to prepare taxes for? (400 people)
2. If you need 30 minutes to prepare taxes and work 5 days a weeks, how many weeks will you need in order to reach your goal? Assume that you work from 9AM-5PM.
(5 weeks: You need 200 hours, and you work 40 hours each week)

April 5, 2011

1. How many milliliters are in one liter? (1000 mL)

2. A chemist uses math all of the time. When you make orange juice from concentrated orange juice, this involves math. If you take a 250 mL can of concentrated orange juice in order to make one liter of regular orange juice, how concentrated is the concentrated orange juice?

Orange juice usually has a sugar concentration of 250 grams per liter. Write your answer for the concentration of sugar in grams per liter. (1000 grams/liter)

Explanation: To make concentrated orange juice, you take out most of the water and freeze it. The amount of sugar doesn’t change. If there were 250 grams of sugar in one liter of orange juice, a can of concentrated orange juice still has the same amount of sugar. 250 grams per 250 mL = 1000 grams per 1000 mL. If you still don’t get it, don’t worry about it.

April 6, 2011

A statistician collects, analyzes, and presents numerical data resulting from surveys and experiments. Take a look at the investment data and decide which investment should be the best. Find the percent change for each company, and then find out what the real names of the companies are.

5 points for all five percent of change calculations
2 points for choosing the best investment
3 points for correctly naming the companies using their stock symbols

Company Price on Mar 1 Price on Apr 1
SBUX 33.23 37.25 12.10%
LUV 11.89 12.74 7.15%
MCD 75.71 76.30 0.78%
CMG 243.00 273.26 12.45%
CAKE 29.16 30.13 3.33%

ANS: The investment with the highest percent of change was Chipotle. However, many investors would choose McDonald’s based on the given information. “Buy low and sell high” is the advice given with safe investments like McDonald’s.

April 7, 2011
Baking requires a lot of measuring, which is of course math related. A baker created a cake recipe that required 3 cups of flour. However, when she decided to start a baking business she found that she would need to measure pounds of flour instead of cups. If one cake uses 3 cups of flour, how many cakes could she bake with 50 pounds of flour?
(Use 4 cups = 1 pound; 66 cakes with 2 cups of flour remaining.)

April 8, 2011

Have you ever heard of a foreign exchange trader? There are people that make money buying and trading money from different countries.

The one US dollar was worth 3.98 Argentine pesos on January 3, 2011. On April 7, 2011 one US dollar was worth 4.05 pesos. If you purchased $1000 US worth of Argentine pesos on January 3, how much is your investment worth today? How much money did you make or lose?
(It is worth US $982.72, so you lost $17.28.)