Question

You are the supervisor in a car assembly plant where each car produced requires one body and four wheels. You discover that the plant has 200 bodies and 900 wheels. How many cars can be made from this inventory? (How does this problem fit in with the law of definite proportions?)

Answer 1

Maximum cars = 200 cars

This relates to the law of definite proportions because, similarly to a compound that always contains the same proportion of elements, a car will contain the same proportion of wheels and body.

Procedure

To solve this problem, we will consider that a car needs 1 body and 4 wheels and that you can produce cars as long as you aren't missing the body or a wheel.

We divide 900/4 = 225 sets of wheels

The limiting part will be the bodies. Therefore you can only produce 200 cars. This relates to the law of definite proportions, which states that a given chemical compound contains the same elements in the same proportions by mass. For example, pure water contains 11.19% hydrogen and 88.81% oxygen by mass. It does not matter where the sample of water came from or how it was prepared. Similarly, any car contains a body and 4 wheels.