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

Answer 1

We can set up a proportion to solve the problem:

unsharpened pencils / total pencils = 2/50

We can simplify by cross-multiplying:

unsharpened pencils * 50 = 2 * total pencils

unsharpened pencils = 2 * total pencils / 50

Now we can plug in the given information:

unsharpened pencils = 2 * 300 / 50 = 12

Therefore, we would expect about 12 colored pencils in the basket to be unsharpened.