Question

A lottery has a grand prize of 23 1/2 million dollars. There are 4 people who have winning tickets and they share this prize equally. How many millions of dollars does each person get? Express the answer as a mixed number.

Answer 1

We should first convert 23 1/2 million dollars to a mixed number:

`23(1)/(2)=(47)/(2)`

Then we need to divide this by 4, since 4 people won an equal amount of the prize:

`(((47)/(2)))/(4)`

And to solve this, we must multiply both the numerator and the denominator by
`(1)/(4)`. This will then cancel out the 4 in the denominator:

`(47)/(2)*(1)/(4) =(47)/(8)`

This is the amount each individual person won; we must convert this to a mixed number since the question asked us to:

`(47)/(8)=5(7)/(8)`

So now we know that each person won
`5(7)/(8)` million dollars.

Answer 2

Each person will get
`5(7)/(8)` million dollars.

Explanation:

Amount of grand prize of the lottery is
`23(1)/(2)` million dollars.

We have to divide this amount among 4 people.

Let each person gets the amount = x million dollars

Then the total amount distributed = 4x million dollars

The equation to model the total amount of the lottery will be

4x =
`(47)/(2)`

x =
`(47)/(2* 4)`

x =
`(47)/(8)` million dollars

=
`5(7)/(8)` million dollars

Therefore, each person will get
`5(7)/(8)` million dollars.