Avery randomly selects 50 colored pencils from a basket and finds that 2 are not sharpened. If the basket contains 300 colored pencils, how many would you expect to be unsharpened?

Answer 1

We can use proportions to answer this question. If Avery randomly selects 50 colored pencils from a basket of 300, that means she is selecting:

50/300 = 1/6

or 16.67% of the total colored pencils. Therefore, we can expect that the proportion of unsharpened colored pencils to the total number of colored pencils in the basket will also be 1/6 or 16.67%. To find out how many colored pencils we would expect to be unsharpened, we can set up a proportion:

unsharpened colored pencils/total colored pencils = 1/6

We know that there are 300 total colored pencils in the basket, so we can solve for the number of unsharpened colored pencils:

unsharpened colored pencils/300 = 1/6

unsharpened colored pencils = (1/6)*300

unsharpened colored pencils = 50

Therefore, we would expect 50 colored pencils in the basket to be unsharpened.