2006 AMC 8 Problems/Problem 16

Problem

Problems 14, 15 and 16 involve Mrs. Reed's English assignment.

A Novel Assignment

The students in Mrs. Reed's English class are reading the same 760-page novel. Three friends, Alice, Bob and Chandra, are in the class. Alice reads a page in 20 seconds, Bob reads a page in 45 seconds and Chandra reads a page in 30 seconds.

Before Chandra and Bob start reading, Alice says she would like to team read with them. If they divide the book into three sections so that each reads for the same length of time, how many seconds will each have to read?

Solution

The amount of pages Bob, Chandra, and Alice will read is in the ratio 4:6:9. Therefore, Bob, Chandra, and Alice read 160, 240, and 360 pages respectively. They would also be reading for the same amount of time because the ratio of the pages read was based on the time it takes each of them to read a page. Therefore, the amount of seconds each person reads is simply .

Solution 2

We can solve this using equations. Let Bob read pages and Chandra read pages. Then Alice would read pages. Then we can set up the equations using the time it takes them to read a page: . Since we only have two variables, we only need two equations. Let's use and . We can simplify down to and down to . We can then solve the equations accordingly:

From the equation , we know that .

Now that we know , we can multiply it by (Bob's speed) to get the answer: =

See Also

The problems on this page are copyrighted by the Mathematical Association of America's American Mathematics Competitions.