Math Word Problem

I'm stuck on this and I'm not really sure how to proceed. Do I start by figuring out how many total cigarettes were smoked? Thanks, I get started and lose myself every time I try to figure this thing out. It's a Biology homework question. As far as math goes, I'm taking Stats 1 (and like it).

Jennifer smokes a pack of cigarettes (20 per pack) a day, for 40 years. If each cigarette shortens her life, on average, by 5 minutes, how many years "before her time" will she die?

Yes the first thing you have to do is figure out how many cigarettes have been smoked. So 20 X 365 X 40 = 292000. Each cigarette takes off 5 minutes so 292000 X 5 = 1460000. Then you have to divide that by the number of minutes in a year. I'll save you the trouble and tell you that it's 525600. 1460000/525600 = 2.777 years. Or 2 years, 283 days, 5 hours, and 45 minutes, more or less

Thank you! For some reason I was making this out to be much harder than it needed to be..lol.

I thought I had it wrong. I did it differently by just finding out how many minutes are lost per year.

Actually, that answer is wrong.

In 40 years, there are 10 leap years which add an extra day to the year, thus adding 200 more cigarettes to the total. It will also add another 14,400 minutes to the total number of minutes.

Of course that's assuming that the question starts at the beginning of a leap year.

You could always do both answers the leap year answer and the one without leap years. then you have both bases covered in case your teached did or didnt think about the leap year. It might be a trick question LOL


I hate math with a passion it took me three semesters to figure out plane geometry and now I use a calculator for everything!

Since I took business courses in high school, I never had to take much in the way of algebra or anything like that. So when I decided to go to college, I needed some math classes. I decided to teach myself college algebra. It took about a year and a lot of patience from my son (who was tutoring me through the books), but I managed to pass the CLEP test with flying colors. I also took a statistics class, which was very interesting.

I'm not really all that math-oriented. But I've gotten better since I've had this job.

You could always use 365.25 days in the year. That is the formula we use at work to compute daily interest on our loans.

Just to clarify I emailed the instructor. She said not to take leap years into account.

Originally Posted by TigerOnTheProwl

Yes the first thing you have to do is figure out how many cigarettes have been smoked. So 20 X 365 X 40 = 292000. Each cigarette takes off 5 minutes so 292000 X 5 = 1460000. Then you have to divide that by the number of minutes in a year. I'll save you the trouble and tell you that it's 525600. 1460000/525600 = 2.777 years. Or 2 years, 283 days, 5 hours, and 45 minutes, more or less

Click to expand...

Of course if we include leap years, that would increase the number of days by 10 x 20 = 200 days x 5 minutes = 1,000 minutes or 16.6 hrs.

Oops, missed the part about leap years not being included.