17 of the 100 towels at a hotel are clean. What is the ratio of the number of clean towels to the number of dirty towels?

Question

Write your answer as two numbers separated by a colon (for example, 2:3).

Answer 1

To find the ratio of clean towels to dirty towels, we start by determining the number of dirty towels.

There are 100 towels in total, and 17 of them are clean. Therefore, the number of dirty towels is:

\[ 100 - 17 = 83 \]

Now we have 17 clean towels and 83 dirty towels. To express this as a ratio of clean towels to dirty towels, we write:

\[ \text{Ratio} = \text{clean towels} : \text{dirty towels} = 17 : 83 \]

Thus, the ratio of the number of clean towels to the number of dirty towels is:

17:83