ShmoopTube

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Here's a shmoopy question for you...

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Gigglepuss Clown Academy has 1200 clown-students enrolled.

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480 of them participate in mandatory after-school clown sports like egg tossing...

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for both distance and accuracy.

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Another 320 future clowns are involved in the school's band and musical activities,

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focusing on horns, kazoos and snoggits.

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The rest of the clown students are placed in physical education classes...

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...learning about such things as how to duck quickly out of the way of a pie,

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and how to collapse your body so you can fit inside a clown car with six of your peers.

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What percentage of the total student population are enrolled in these physical education classes?

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And here are the potential answers...

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Okay, let's not get all caught up in the clown humor.

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They are funny... and a little sad... but they are thrown in to many test questions

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just to distract... and annoy us.

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We just have to focus on the numbers. Be strong.

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The question already tells us that the TOTAL clown population is 1200.

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And it also gives us the break down of this 1200:

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480 in sports, 320 in music, and "the rest" in P.E.

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So in this two-part question, we have first to calculate the NUMBER in PE.

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Simple enough... let's use the equation 480 + 320 + x equals 1200.

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If we subtract the 480 and 320 from both sides, we get x = 400.

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OK, part one done.

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The second part asks for the percentage of PE clowns out of the total.

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We now know both numbers, so this should be a cinch.

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400 out of the total 1200 clowns are in PE. So we have 400 over 1200...

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which simplifies to 4 over 12... which simplifies further to 1 over 3.

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If we didn't know that 1/3 was about 33%, we'd divide it out this way:

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3 goes into 1 to get point-3... we have 1 left over... and 3 goes into ten 3 times...

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...and yeah - it repeats, so it's point-33.

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We know that if 1 is 100%, point-33 should be 33%.

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Scanning the answer choices... 33% pops right out at us... -- answer B.

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We wish you the best of luck in clown school.

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Just make sure you attend all your PE classes, so you get good at avoiding pie to the face.

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