Problema Solution
Your friend's boss manufactures Styrofoam cups and has given your friend the assignment of determining the height for a box that will hold a stack of 100 cups. Your friend has a few of the cups, but he has no idea of how he can figure out the height of a stack of 100 of them.
He has started measuring stacks of cups. He has measured one cup and found that it was 3 1/2 inches high. Two cups are 4 inches high, and three cups are 4 1/2 inches high.
Answer provided by our tutors
the first cup is 3 1/2 inches high, then every additional cup is adding 1/2 inches to the total height (since 4 - 3 1/2 = 1/2 and 4 2/1 - 4 = 1/2). There are 99 cups adding onto the first cup, so the total height would be:
3 1/2 + 99*(1/2)
53
So the total height of 100 those Styrofoam cups would be 53 inches.