How do I solve this question?: How many seconds are there in m minutes and s seconds?

Test Preparation SAT Preparation
1

This is from the SAT official study guide edition #2 (pg 787 #9)

These are the answer choices:

a. 60m+s

b. m+60s

c. 60(m+s)

d. (m+s)/60

e. (m/60)+s

I know the answer is a, but i dont know why. Im a pathetic idiot so i didn’t know how to solve it

happy new year.

2

Be more positive about yourself.

Let’s break the question up. First, how many seconds are there in s seconds? There would be ‘s’ in total, by definition. How many seconds in a minute? 60 seconds. So how many seconds in ‘m’ minutes? It would be 60 times m minutes, i.e. 60m. So the equation is 60m + s.

One other easy way to do this is to plug in numbers. What if the question was “How many seconds are there in 0 minutes and 1 seconds?” then m = 0 and s =1. You know the right answer is then 1. Evaluate the equations:

a => 1
b => 60
c => 60
d => 1/60
e => 1

So you know the answer is a or e. Try m = 1 and you’ll see that e gives you 1/60 + 1, but you can’t have a fractional amount of seconds (since there are 60 seconds in a minute), so you know the answer is a.

3

thanks so much, i get it