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 C2.  CALCULATING AN AMOUNT BY WEIGHING 

Coins can be counted by weighing them.  If the cashier in a bank is given a bag containing 20 p coins they would not waste time counting them to ascertain the total value but rather, by measuring the total mass and knowing the mass of an individual 20 p coin, they could calculate the total number of coins and hence their value (in practice a calibrated machine does the donkey work).

Suppose a bag containing 20 p UK coins is found to have a mass of 356 g and an individual coin is known to have a mass of 7.12 g. It follows that the bag contains 50 coins.
For
m = 178 g, there must be 25 coins present.

The general relationship used between the quantities in these calculations is the expression

2020_Amount_of_substance_p2b.jpg

The term ‘unit amount’ refers to the counting unit being adopted, e.g., one pair, one dozen, one ream, etc., as in shoes, eggs, paper.

Re-write a relationship similar to that above in order to solve the problem that follows.

Q. One dozen chocolate biscuits has a mass of 180 g.

Calculate the amount (unit: dozen) of chocolate biscuits in a batch of mass 5760 g.

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