You are steaming at 19 knots and burning 440 barrels of fuel per day. You must decrease your consumption to 137 barrels per day. What must you reduce your speed to in order to burn this amount of fuel?
• Relationship between speed and fuel consumption (often approximated by a cube or square of speed for exam problems) • Setting up a proportion between old speed/consumption and new speed/consumption • Converting barrels per day ratio into a speed ratio
• How does fuel consumption change when speed is reduced—linearly, by the square, or by the cube, according to typical exam assumptions? • If fuel consumption is proportional to the cube (or square) of the speed, how can you express the new speed as a fraction of the old speed using the fuel ratio 137/440? • Once you find the fraction of the original speed, what numerical speed do you get when you multiply that fraction by 19 knots?
• Be clear what power/fuel proportionality the question expects (e.g., speed squared or cubed) based on your exam materials. • Carefully compute the fuel ratio: 137 ÷ 440, and then apply the correct root depending on the proportionality (square root or cube root). • After computing the new speed, compare with the closest multiple-choice option and check that the reduced speed gives a much lower fuel consumption, not a small change.
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