Rate word problem

[ecourtney12]

I am having trouble answering this problem. A car travels 204 miles in 4 hours and 15 minutes. How many miles does it travel per hour? Please help. Me. Thank you for your time in this matter. My e-mail address is emilieyorkie@hotmail.com.
Sincerely,
ecourtney12

 

[tkhunny]

You'll have to know the actual number of minutes. Minutes / Hours gives a decimal number of hours. After that, it's just a division problem.

 

[JeffM]

I am having trouble answering this problem. A car travels 204 miles in 4 hours and 15 minutes. How many miles does it travel per hour? Please help. Me. Thank you for your time in this matter. My e-mail address is emilieyorkie@hotmail.com.
Sincerely,
ecourtney12

tkhunny has given you the right answer, but I shall take the liberty of expanding it by giving an example.
Suppose a car travels 60 miles in an hour and twenty minutes.
tkhunny says get time into one kind of unit.
Let's take his advice. An hour and twenty minutes = (60 + 20) minutes = 80 minutes.
So the car is going 60 miles per 80 minutes.
As tkhunny says, we have a problem in division. What is 60/80?
The car is going 0.75 miles per minute.
But you want the answer in miles per hour.
Well however many miles the car will go in a minute it will go 60 times that many miles in an hour.
So multiply by 60.
The car is going (60 * 0.75) miles per hour = 45 miles per hour.

 

[mmm4444bot]

A car travels 204 miles in 4 hours and 15 minutes. How many miles does it travel per hour?

They're trying to ask for the average speed of the car (in mph) over the entire trip.

In other words, they should have asked "How many average miles does it travel per hour?"

Otherwise, we do not have enough information to answer their question.

Average speed in miles per hour (mph) is easy to calculate, after we know the total miles and the total hours:

\(\displaystyle \text{Average Speed (in mph)} \;=\; \frac{\text{Total Miles}}{\text{Total Hours}}\)

They gave you Total Miles.

How many Total Hours is 4 hours + 15 minutes?