You are driving to a vacation spot that is 1500 miles away. Including rest stops, it takes you 42 hours to get to the vacation spot. You estimate that you drove at an average speed of 50 miles per hour. How many hours were you NOT driving?

12 hours.

Step-by-step explanation:

So the vacation spot is a total of 1,500 miles away.

We drove at an average speed of 50 miles per hour and we in total took 42 hours to get there.

So, let's find the number of hours that was spent driving.

Since we drove at 50 miles per hour, this means that this times the amount of hours x will equal to 1,500 miles total. In other words:

Let's multiply both sides by 1hr/50 miles. So:

The left cancels. Simplify the right:

Divide:

So, a total of 30 hours was spend driving.

Since the whole trip took 42 hours, this means that the hours spend not driving was 42-30 or 12 hours.

x is variable or an unknown value to find

example:

2x = 5 which means x = 3

a is the correct