Question

Baseball cards come in packs of a dozen (12) cards. Matt has 132 baseball cards. How many packs of baseball cards did he buy?

Answer 1

Hint: This type of question is based on the concept of word problems. In this type of questions, we need to analyse the given data in the form of words and convert it into a mathematical form. We then simplify the equations to obtain the answer. In this case, we need to calculate how many packs that he bought adds up to the total number of cards that Matt owns.

Complete step by step answer:
In the given question, it says that baseball cards come in packs of a dozen. This means that every individual pack of baseball cards consists of a dozen cards each or 12 cards each. We can write this below in the form of an expression or equation as,
No. of baseball cards per pack = 12 …… (1)
Now it says that Matt has 132 baseball cards. This means that Matt has bought enough packs to gather a total number of 132 baseball cards. This can also be written in the form of an equation as,
No. of baseball cards Matt owns = 132 …… (2)
Now we need to find the number of packs of baseball cards that Matt bought. We know that each pack contains 12 cards and Matt must have bought so many packs such that all the cards put together from all the packs add up to 132. So all we need to do here is to divide the total number of cards Matt owns by the total number of cards per pack.
$\Rightarrow \text{No}\text{. of packs of baseball cards Matt bought = }\dfrac{\text{No}\text{. of baseball cards Matt owns}}{\text{No}\text{. of baseball cards per pack}}$
$\Rightarrow \text{No}\text{. of packs of baseball cards Matt bought}=\dfrac{132}{12}$
Simplifying this by division,
$\Rightarrow \text{No}\text{. of packs of baseball cards Matt bought}=11$

Hence, we can see that Matt bought 11 packs of baseball cards.

Note: We can also solve this question by adding up the cards per pack until we reach the required number of cards 132. We add all the number of cards per pack such as 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + … until it equals 132. We need to add 12 eleven times to get 132 therefore, indicating the total number of packs of baseball cards needed.