Real-Life Math
You are an ethnobotanist. You work for Medico, Inc., a major pharmaceutical
company in Pennsylvania. Medico keeps a team of ethnobotanists to research
new herbal remedies. Your latest project is researching feverfew. That's
a herb that has been found to lessen the pain of migraines.
You must
estimate the cost per pound to plant, harvest and ship the feverfew to manufacturing
plants in Pennsylvania. You have found that to grow the plant efficiently,
only half of those planted could be harvested each year.
You decide
to work with a controlled number of plants -- 5,000 in the original planting.
It cost Medico $2 per plant to plant and cultivate the first 5,000 plants.
After
the plants were cultivated and grown to harvesting size, Medico had to pay
10 workers $10 an hour each for 12 hours a day to harvest the plants. It took
them 5 days to pick all of the plants.
Finally, shipping the plants
to the manufacturing facility costs $3.60 per pound. The 2,500 plants that
were harvested weigh 930 pounds.
What is the cost per
pound to plant, harvest and ship the feverfew?