Question

A dry cleaner charges $\$2$ for up to 3 pounds in weight of clothes, and 30 cents per pound or part thereof up to a maximum weight of 10 pounds per load. What is the cost in dollars of cleaning 6 and a half pounds of clothes?

Answer 1

Hint: In this problem, we have to find the cost in dollars of cleaning 6 and a half pounds of clothes. We should know that if we have to clean 6.5 pounds of clothes, we should pay for 7 pounds for what we have given ‘per part thereof’. We are already given the cost for 3 pounds. We can find the remaining pounds and multiply the cost for it to find the total cost.

Complete step by step solution:
We know that a dry cleaner charges $\$2$ for up to 3 pounds in weight of clothes.
Here we have to find the cost of dollars of cleaning 6 and a half pounds of clothes.
We know that if we have to clean 6.5 pounds of clothes, we should pay for 7 pounds for what we have given ‘per part thereof’.
We are given 3 pounds cost, so remaining we will be having 4 pounds.
We are given that there are 30 cent per pound, that is 0.3, then we can multiply it with the remaining pounds, we get
\[\Rightarrow 4\times 0.3=1.2\]
We can now add the cost for the given pounds in the above step, we get
\[\Rightarrow 1.2+2=3.20\]
Therefore, the cost of dollars for cleaning 6 and a half pounds of clothes is 3.20.

Note: Students make mistakes while finding the cost per pound. We should concentrate on the question part as we are given the phrase ‘per part thereof’ as we have to make conversions. We should convert the given 30 cent per pound in decimal part to multiply with the given data.