Some ants can lift up to 50 times their own weight. Suppose a 120 pound 8th grade student could do the same thing.

• Which number sentence can be used to find how much the eighth grade student could lift?

The answer to this problem is letter C, 120 x 50. Let's see why C is our choice.

The first thing you want to do is to be clear as to what it is you are asked to find out. In this problem you are told that an ant can lift 50 times its own weight. You want to see how much a 120 pound 8th grader could lift. Notice that with the ant they don't tell you how much it weighs, but we do know that the 8th grader weighs 120 pounds.

We are told that the student can lift 50 times his own weight. Taking those words and changing them into a mathematical sentence would look like this:

50 times his own weight
50 x 120

Notice also that we don't have to find the total so therefore the question mark after the equal sign represents not finding the answer.

So our final answer is letter C, because we are able to rewrite 50 x 120 as 120 x 50 because of the commutative property of multiplication.