Five workers have been hired to complete a job. If one additional worker is hired, they could complete the job 12 days earlier. If the job needs to be completed 32 days earlier, how many additional workers should be hired?

1 answer

Let \( d \) be the number of days it would take for the original 5 workers to complete the job. The total amount of work can be expressed in terms of man-days, which is the product of the number of workers and the number of days they work. Therefore, the total work required for the job is given by:

\[ \text{Total work} = 5d \text{ man-days} \]

When 1 additional worker is hired (making it 6 workers), the time taken to complete the job decreases by 12 days, so the new time to finish the job is:

\[ d - 12 \]

The equation for the work done by 6 workers in this new time is:

\[ \text{Total work} = 6(d - 12) \text{ man-days} \]

Since the total work remains constant, we set the two expressions for total work equal to each other:

\[ 5d = 6(d - 12) \]

Expanding the right side gives:

\[ 5d = 6d - 72 \]

Rearranging this equation yields:

\[ 72 = 6d - 5d \]

Therefore, we find:

\[ d = 72 \]

Now we know that the time it takes for 5 workers to complete the job is 72 days.

Next, when we want the job to be completed 32 days earlier, the new target completion time becomes:

\[ 72 - 32 = 40 \text{ days} \]

Let \( n \) be the total number of workers we need to hire to complete the job in 40 days. In terms of man-days, we have:

\[ n \times 40 = 5d \]

Substituting \( d = 72 \) gives us:

\[ 5 \times 72 = 360 \text{ man-days} \]

This means we can express the relationship as:

\[ n \times 40 = 360 \]

Solving for \( n \):

\[ n = \frac{360}{40} = 9 \]

Since we originally had 5 workers, the number of additional workers needed is:

\[ 9 - 5 = 4 \]

Thus, the number of additional workers that should be hired to complete the job 32 days earlier is:

\[ \boxed{4} \]