Middle School

A stack of 500 pieces of paper is 1.875 inches tall.

Diego guesses that each piece of paper is 0.015 inches thick. Explain how you know that Diego’s answer is not correct.

Compute the thickness of each piece of paper. Show your reasoning.

Answer :

Final answer:

Diego's guess of 0.015 inches per piece would result in a stack height of 7.5 inches, greater than the actual height of 1.875 inches. The correct thickness is calculated by dividing the stack height by the number of pieces, resulting in 0.00375 inches per piece.

Explanation:

To determine why Diego's answer is not correct, we need to calculate the actual thickness of each piece of paper in the stack by dividing the height of the entire stack by the number of pieces. Diego guessed that each piece of paper is 0.015 inches thick. If this were true, the height of the stack would be 0.015 inches x 500 pieces = 7.5 inches, which is significantly higher than the actual height of 1.875 inches given in the problem.

To find the correct thickness of each piece of paper, we divide the total height of the stack by the number of pieces. The calculation is as follows:

Total height of stack = 1.875 inches

Number of pieces = 500 pieces

Thickness of each piece = Total height of stack / Number of pieces = 1.875 inches / 500 pieces

Therefore, the correct thickness of each piece is 0.00375 inches.

If there were 1000 sheets of paper, then the thickness of each sheet would be 1.875 in divided by 1000.


1.875/1000 = 0.001875


Since there are 500 sheets of paper, each one is twice as thick as 0.001875, so each sheet is 0.00375 inches thick. 0.015 is much greater than 0.00375, so it must be incorrect.