homework help?

Question

A truckload of plastic soda bottles was finely shredded at a recycling center. The plastic shreds were placed into 55-liter drums. What is the mass of the plastic shreds inside one of the drums?
Hint: 55 liters = 55,000 millileters = 55,000 cm cubed

Please explain how you got the answer thanks

Answer 1

It looks like you're missing some information here. From the looks of this, it looks like a density problem, where

D = m/v

D is the density of the material (usually in kg/m^3 or similar)
m is the mass of the material (usually kg or g)
v is the volume of the material (usually in some cubic measurement)

Since you have the volume and you're looking for the mass of the material, rewrite this so that it says m = Dv.

What's missing? The density of the plastic soda bottles - that should be somewhere in the problem or in a table somewhere. Once you have that, you can plug in to the m = Dv equation - just be sure that all of your units are the same (i.e. if density is in kg/m^3, covert it to cm^3 or otherwise convert your volume from cm^3 to m^3).