I need a little assistance answering this math problem?

Your math teacher should be ashamed for making young ladies use improper fractions, you know!

Regardless...

1. Since the goal is to express the area in square feet, the measurements given need to be converted to some factor of feet. The 12' 6" is twelve and a half feet. So that could be written as 12 1/2. Then that can be converted to an improper fraction by multiplying the 12 by the denominator 2 and then adding the original 1, making it 25/2. The 10' 4" is ten and a third feet, written as 10 1/3. Performing the same operation as before to convert to an improper fraction, you would get 31/3. You would then multiply the 25/2 by 31/3 and get 775/6. This improper fraction cannot be reduced. So the answer is 775/6 square feet. (A rather useless exercise in my opinion.)

2. Tiles are never 5 inches square, but we will humor the teacher in this task. We need to convert the measurements to feet to arrive at our answer. So we get the clumsy figure of 5/12 (twelve inches in a foot, five inches are in question.) To get the area, we are forced to multiply 5/12 by itself, getting the ridiculous answer of 25/144, which cannot be reduced. So that answer is 25/144 square feet.

3. Having gone to all that trouble to muck up things, now we need to divide 775/6 by 25/144... what a farce. Fortunately, to do something this ridiculous, you don't have to divide at all; you just invert one of the factors. Then you get the nearly manageable problem of multiplying 775/6 by 144/25... yes, it's actually easier this way. You end up with a headache-producing 111,600/150 which you hope reduces to a whole number; otherwise you are going to have some parts of one tile left over. Oh, thank goodness, it does: 744 tiles that you cannot buy because they don't exist.

4. How does this relate to the real world? It is an example of how things are done in Utah by native rocket scientists which in itself is an oxymoron within an oxymoron. Some people just should not be allowed to write textbooks.

Hmm first convert everything to inches so width is 150 inches and length is 124 inches. Then multiply that to get the area.

2. 5 x 5 =? Oops, you want it in feet so after that, divide it by 12

3. Then do area of floor/ 25 inches to get how many tiles

4. You said you got this one so...

Hope this helps.