Solve the following word problem. A fish is swimming at −10.8 meters, or 10.8 meters below sea level. Every 2 minutes it descends another 1.5 meters. How long will it take for the fish to reach a depth of −37.8 meters? Show your work and write a sentence to explain what your answer means. (make it like a 7th grader wrote it)

To find out how long it will take for the fish to reach a depth of -37.8 meters, we first need to figure out how far the fish needs to go from its original depth of -10.8 meters.

1. **Calculate the distance to descend:**
The fish starts at a depth of -10.8 meters and wants to get to -37.8 meters. We can find the distance it needs to descend by subtracting the two depths.

\[
-37.8 - (-10.8) = -37.8 + 10.8 = -27 \text{ meters}
\]

So, the fish needs to go down 27 meters.

2. **Calculate how many 1.5 meter descents are needed:**
Since the fish descends 1.5 meters every 2 minutes, we divide the total distance it needs to descend by the distance it goes down in each step.

\[
\text{Number of descents} = \frac{27 \text{ meters}}{1.5 \text{ meters/step}} = 18 \text{ steps}
\]

3. **Calculate the total time taken for the descents:**
Each descent takes 2 minutes, so we multiply the number of descents by the time per descent.

\[
\text{Total time} = 18 \text{ steps} \times 2 \text{ minutes/step} = 36 \text{ minutes}
\]

Therefore, it will take the fish **36 minutes** to reach a depth of -37.8 meters.

**Sentence Explanation:**
It will take the fish 36 minutes to swim down to -37.8 meters from its starting point of -10.8 meters.

make it a short paragraph

To find out how long it will take the fish to reach -37.8 meters from -10.8 meters, we first calculate that it needs to descend a total of 27 meters. Since the fish goes down 1.5 meters every 2 minutes, we find that it will take 18 descents to reach its destination. Multiplying the 18 descents by the 2 minutes each descent takes gives us a total of 36 minutes. So, it will take the fish 36 minutes to swim down to -37.8 meters.