ShmoopTube

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And here's your shmoop du jour.

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The following graph relates the number of pounds of ear wax with the cost of said wax at a certain store.

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Oh, come on. Where do you think candles come from?

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If 2.5 pounds of ear wax were purchased, what would be the corresponding cost?

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Here are the potential answers...

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And yeah, hit pause. Try it yourself first. Go on.

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This question is just asking whether we can read a graph.

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BIG HINT: USE A RULER!

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Well...this kind of ruler.

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Ew, not like that.

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Maybe just the edge of a piece of paper will do.

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Here we are being asked to find the dollar amount that corresponds to 2.5 pounds of ear wax...

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and here we see pounds.

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If they'd put kilograms or tons or some other screwy metric, we'd have had to do some recalculating -

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- but here it's just straightforward.

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And we go over one, two... and a half... to the right.

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Then look straight up.

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It's a bird... it's a plane... no, it's the line intersecting the weight to price

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dynamics of this problem.

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Bet that was right on the tip of your brain. So now just look straight left from this point

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of intersection on the line and we get a price. What is that price?

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Well, we know that this is 0... and this is 20... so half way has to be 10.

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And the line is slightly above the 10 and definitely not 15.

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So look at the answer set -- it has to be B, or $12.50. Done.

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If somehow you didn't hear the end of that explanation...

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...you may need to get the wax out of your ears.

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