If 12 pairs of socks sell for $5.79, how much is one pair of socks?

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Answer 1 · 2018-01-26T03:44:15

Approximately equal to $0.5$ cents.

Divide $5.79$ by $12$ to find the answer or you can use a proportion to calculate it (really helpful for me).

First, I put $12$ over $5.79$ so $12/5.79$ . So we have socks/costs. You can have costs/socks. It does not matter.

They asked for how much is one pair of socks, we can write

$"12 pair of socks"/($5.79) = "1 pair of socks" / x$

Here $x$ represents the cost of $1$ pair of socks. It is good to use a variable when you have an unknown value.

Then we can do cross-multiplication. We have

$12x = $5.79$

Solving for $x$ gives you

$x = $0.4825$

or approximately equal to $0.5$ cents (do not forget the unit).

You can also search Google about cross-multiplication or use Khan Academy for more useful resources.