Find the surface area very fast

Element x decays radioactively with a half life of 8 minutes. if there are 450 grams of element x, how long, to the nearest tenth of a minute, would it take the element to decay to 37 grams?

Amira is painting a rectangular banner 2 1/4 yards wide. the banner will have a blue background. amira has enough paint to cover 1 1/2 square yards of the wall. the school colors are blue and yellow, so amira wants to add yellow rectangles on the left and right sides of the blue rectangle. the yellow rectangles will each be 3/4 yards wide and the same height as the blue rectangle. what will be the total area of the two yellow rectangles?

Consider the sequence below. 3 , 1 , 1/3 , 1/9 , select the explicit function which defines the sequence.