June Wedding Math - The Problems
06/21/2004

 
June is known as the month for weddings! Let’s take a look at some math before, during, and after the ceremony. Before the ceremony, there are often a lot of out-of-town guests making their way to the big event. If the 290-mile drive to the wedding took the Baldrate family 5.5 hours, and the drive back home took 7.75 hours, what was their average speed for the round-trip journey? Express your answer as a decimal to the nearest tenth.

Now that everyone has made it to the wedding ceremony, the ceremony can begin! In many weddings, there is a processional song that plays while the bridesmaids walk down an aisle to the front of the congregation. Kelly’s processional song is exactly 5 minutes, 30 seconds and she has five bridesmaids. At the rehearsal, they found that it took 43 seconds, on average, for each bridesmaid to complete her walk down the aisle. Kelly wants 10 seconds of the processional song to play before the first bridesmaid starts her walk. She also wants the last bridesmaid to finish her walk just as the song ends. In order for this to happen, there must be a pause between the end of one bridesmaid’s walk and the beginning of the next bridesmaid’s walk. If this pause-time is to remain consistent for each pair of consecutive bridesmaids, how many seconds of pause-time should there be between the end of the one bridesmaid’s walk and the beginning of the next? Express your answer to the nearest whole number.

Once the ceremony has ended, many weddings have a celebration, party or reception afterwards. At Kelly’s reception, 137 guests will be seated at a combination of different-sized round tables. Kelly can use any combination of 12, 11 and 10-person tables. If every seat at every table is used, what is the greatest number of 12-person tables that she can use?