Problem of the Week 4

POW Writeup due Sunday, October 18

Jason and Maya went to Cream Bean Berry and left on their mountain bikes to go home at
1:15 pm. Maya travelled north at 32 mph and Jason travelled east at 24 mph. Determine the
time when Maya and Jason will be 130 miles apart and how far each of them will have
travelled.

UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM:

In Pow 4 the goal was to find out the time when Maya
and Jason would be 130 miles apart. The real problem when I saw this POW was, how am I
going to set this up. So I looked at the problem again and took note of all my known values.
My goal was to find out the answer and find information from it that I can use later on.
PROCESS:
the first thing I did on POW 4 was look at all my known values. The next thing I
did was make a graph. The graph had hours and mph for Maya on the Y axis and hours and
mph for Jason on the X axis, But after guessing and checking my partner and I realized that
this couldnt be right. So we looked again. Our second approach consisted of drawing out a
right triangle and labeling it. We knew we had to do some pythag and some algebra so we
got to it. 32x on one side, and 24x on the other. The made the hypotenuse of the triangle
2
2
2
2
2
130. after that we did (32x)
+ (24x)
= 130
. Then it was just algebra. 1024x
+ 576x
=
2
2
2
16900. Then 1600x
/1600 = 16900/1600. x
=10.56. The square root of x
=3.25. After all this
algebra I went back to the triangle. and instead of 32x I put 104 because 32 times 3.25 is
104. And instead of 24x I put 78 because 24 times 3.25 is 78. Though this is not the final
product, this was as far as I could figure out.
SOLUTION:
Though I did not find the solution to this problem, I believe I got very close but
am just missing a few steps.
JUSTIFICATION:
Because I did not find the answer it is hard to tell if this problem is
reasonable or not, but from what I got I can tell that the answer would be reasonable. My
goal for this POW was to find out the answer and find useful information from it that I can
later on use. Though I didnt find the answer I think I did meet part 2 of my goal. There is
definitely areas where I can improve, but the way I solved this problem had info that I can
use, such as the way I used to get to my algebra. I never knew that you could use a triangle
to figure out distance and mph.