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David measured a swimming pool and made a scale drawing. In real life, the diving board is 20 feet long. It is 2 inches long in the drawing. What scale did David use for the drawing?
1 inch :
feet

1 answer

To find the scale David used for the drawing, we need to compare the length of the diving board in real life to its length in the drawing.

  1. The real-life length of the diving board is 20 feet.
  2. The length of the diving board in the drawing is 2 inches.

First, we need to convert 20 feet to inches since the drawing's measurement is in inches. There are 12 inches in a foot, so:

\[ 20 \text{ feet} = 20 \times 12 = 240 \text{ inches} \]

Now we have:

  • Real-life length: 240 inches
  • Drawing length: 2 inches

To find the scale, we can set up the relationship as follows:

\[ \text{Scale} = \frac{\text{Drawing Length}}{\text{Real-Life Length}} = \frac{2 \text{ inches}}{240 \text{ inches}} \]

This simplifies to:

\[ \text{Scale} = \frac{1}{120} \]

This means for every 1 inch in the drawing, it represents 120 inches in real life.

To convert this to feet (since there are 12 inches in a foot):

\[ 120 \text{ inches} = \frac{120}{12} = 10 \text{ feet} \]

Therefore, the scale is:

\[ \text{Scale} = 1 \text{ inch} : 10 \text{ feet} \]

Thus, David used a scale of 1 inch : 10 feet for the drawing.