Brianna is taking a writing assessment that has 3 sections. She has a total of 5/6  of an hour to finish all the sections. If she is allowed the same amount of time to finish each section, how much time does she have to spend on each section?

1 answer

To find out how much time Brianna has to spend on each section of the writing assessment, we start with the total amount of time she has, which is \( \frac{5}{6} \) of an hour. Since there are 3 sections, we need to divide the total time by the number of sections.

The amount of time for each section is calculated as follows:

\[ \text{Time per section} = \frac{\text{Total time}}{\text{Number of sections}} = \frac{\frac{5}{6}}{3} \]

To divide a fraction by a whole number, we can multiply by the reciprocal of the whole number. Thus, we can write:

\[ \frac{\frac{5}{6}}{3} = \frac{5}{6} \times \frac{1}{3} = \frac{5 \times 1}{6 \times 3} = \frac{5}{18} \]

Now, we find that Brianna has \( \frac{5}{18} \) of an hour to spend on each section.

To convert that into minutes, we recall that 1 hour is 60 minutes. Thus we multiply:

\[ \frac{5}{18} \text{ hours} \times 60 \text{ minutes/hour} = \frac{5 \times 60}{18} \text{ minutes} = \frac{300}{18} \text{ minutes} = \frac{50}{3} \text{ minutes} \approx 16.67 \text{ minutes} \]

Thus, Brianna has \( \frac{5}{18} \) of an hour, or approximately 16 minutes and 40 seconds, to spend on each section.