At a refinery 144,000 tons of sand are required to produce each 125,000 barrels of a tarry material. How many tons of sand are required to produce 2,500 barrels of this tarry material?

2,880 tons of sand

Step-by-step explanation:

In this question, we are asked to calculate the amount of tons of sand required to produce a certain amount of tarry materials if a certain amount of sand had produce an amount of tarry materials.

We work as follows:

First, we write the relation that 144,000 tons of sand produces 125,000 barrels of tarry material, then x of tons would produce 2,500 barrels of tarry materials

To find c, we cross multiply:

x * 125,000 = 2,500 * 144,000

x = (2,500 * 144,000)/125,000

x = 2,880

something that characterises a right triangle is the fact that we may use pythagoras' theorem to find any one of its sides given that we have the length of the other two sides. here, we have the length of the hypotenuse, √(87) yd, and one other side, √(23) yd, thus we can easily find the length of the remaining side using pythagoras' theorem as defined below:

c^2 = a^2 + b^2, where c is the length of the hypotenuse, and a and b are the lengths of the other two sides.

thus, given that c = √(87) and a = √(23), we may substitute these into the formula we defined above to get:

c^2 = a^2 + b^2

(√87)^2 = (√23)^2 + b^2 (substitute c = √87 and a = √23 into the equation)

87 = 23 + b^2 (evaluate (√87)^2 = 87 and (√23)^2 = 23 - remember that the square root of a number, squared will equal that very same number)

64 = b^2 (subtract 23 from both sides)

√64 = b (take the square root of both sides)

8 = b (evaluate √64 = 8)

therefor, the length of the unknown leg in the right triangle is 8 yd (first answer).