Expert: Sherry Wallin - 9/30/2009

Question
Apply understanding of matrix multiplication

A toy company in Seattle makes stuffed toys, including crabs, ducks and cows. The owner designs the toys, and then they are cut ut, sewn, and stuffed by independent contractors. For the months of September and October, each contractor agrees to make the numver of stuffed toys shown in the following matrix.

Two of the contractors know from experience how may minutes it takes them to make each type of toy, as shown in this matrix.

                   Time per Toy (in minutes)
                 Crab      Duck    Cow
      Elise       55        60      90
      Harvey      80        50     100

Convert the minute totals to hours. What matrix operation could you use to do this conversion? Does your calculator or computer software have the capability to perform this type of matrix operation?  

Answer
The numbers in your matrix are in minutes, and how would you convert those minutes to hours?
You would multiply by 1 hour/60 minutes * the number of minutes and your minutes would cancel leaving you with hours. You do the same thing with this matrix. In the matrix you want each total to be in hours so multiply the matrix by the scalar 1/60.

Math Prof

PS Sorry about the typos.