Maths Olympiad Prep

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, 2025

Algebra Difficulty 1.4 Junior Find the answer Canada

In the graph, the five points show the money earned versus time
worked for each of five employees. Each was paid a different but fixed
number of dollars per hour. Which letter represents the employee who was
paid the most money per hour?

Hide/Reveal Description of Diagram for Question 12

A graph with horizontal axis Time (hours) and vertical axis Money
Earned ().Thereare). There are 14$ equally
spaced vertical lines, including the vertical axis, and 1515 equally spaced horizontal lines,
including the horizontal axis. Each of the letters AA through EE marks a point where two lines intersect. Counting horizontal lines from the bottom up and vertical lines from left to right, not including the axes, the letters are located at the following
intersections:

Letter AA: 2nd vertical line and 10th horizontal line
Letter BB: 4th vertical line and 6th horizontal line
Letter CC: 6th vertical line and 12th horizontal line
Letter DD: 8th vertical line and 4th horizontal line
Letter EE: 10th vertical line and 8th horizontal line

Pick one

Solution

The vertical axis represents money earned (in dollars) and the
horizontal axis represents time (in hours).

Thus, each employee’s money earned per hour is the slope of the line
segment from the origin (0,0)(0,0) to
the employee’s letter.

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The employee who was paid the most money per hour is the employee
whose line segment has the greatest slope.

The line segment with the greatest slope is the steepest of the 55 line segments, and so Employee AA was paid the most money per hour.

Alternately, we could add numbers to each of the axes and use them to
determine the slope of each line, and thus the money earned per hour for
each employee.

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Source: CEMC, University of Waterloo, licensed CC-BY-NC-4.0. Statement reproduced verbatim; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project.