Question

You have two pieces for fabric. One piece is 6 feet wide and the other piece is 7.5 feet wide. You want to cut both pieces into strips of equal width that are as wide as possible. How wide should you cut the strips of fabric?

Answer 1

Strips should be 1.5 ft wide.

Explanation:

Given:

Width of 1st piece = 6 ft

Width of 2nd piece = 7.5 ft

To find:

To find the maximum width possible to make strips of equal size from both the pieces.

Solution:

This problem can be visualized as if we are given two numbers and we have to find the Highest common factor for both of them i.e. HCF of 6 and 7.5 will be our answer.

Let us try to factorize the given factors:

`7.5 = 3 * 2.5 = \underline {3 * 0.5} * 5`

`6 = 3 * 2 = \underline {3 * 0.5 }* 2`

The common factors are highlighted above as underlined.

Therefore, the answer is 3
`*` 0.5 = 1.5 ft

Strips should be 1.5 ft wide.