Seawater is 5% salt. How much seawater do you need to ge to get 17.25 lb of salt?

Answer 1

We can start the problem by using a proportion:

"5% salt" = "5 parts salt per 100 parts seawater" = 5/100

Let's use "s" to represent the amount of seawater we need in pounds.

Then, the amount of salt in pounds can be calculated as:

0.05s = salt in pounds

We know that the amount of salt we need is 17.25 lb, so we can set up an equation:

0.05s = 17.25

To solve for s, we can divide both sides by 0.05:

s = 17.25 ÷ 0.05

s = 345

Therefore, we need 345 pounds of seawater to get 17.25 pounds of salt.