Maria rides her bicycle to school

2026 Practice Tests (digital)

2026 Practice Test C Math · Question 9 of 50

Question

Maria rides her bicycle to school at a constant speed of 15 miles per hour. If the distance to school is 6 miles, how many minutes will it take Maria to get to school?

Show the answer

Correct answer: C

Maria’s rate of speed is given as 15 miles per hour. Since 1 hour is equivalent to 60 minutes, her rate of speed, in miles per minute, can be determined.

$\frac{15\text{ miles}}{1\text{ hour}} = \frac{15\text{ miles}}{60\text{ minutes}} = \frac{1\text{ mile}}{4\text{ minutes}}$ , or $\frac{1}{4}$ mile per minute.

Therefore, it takes Maria 4 minutes to ride 1 mile.

The distance to school is 6 miles, so it will take $6 \times 4 = 24$ minutes to ride to school.

Question analysis

Maria bikes 6 miles to school at a constant 15 miles per hour, and students find how many minutes the ride takes. It tests using a rate to find a time and converting hours to minutes. With the speed given per hour and the question asking, in bold, for minutes, keeping track of units is the main hurdle.

NYS standards: 6.RP.3b unit rate problems
6.RP.3d converting measurement units
Grade level: Grade 6 content, by NYS standard
Compared with grade 7: Below grade 7 Distance, speed and time with whole numbers is grade 6 rate work. The only extra demand is an answer in minutes when the speed is per hour, a conversion grade 7 students make routinely.
Estimated difficulty: Straightforward: two steps or one careful reading.
Thinking it demands: Depth of knowledge 2, skills and concepts · mainly apply
What makes it hard: Something you must already know minor
Error-prone arithmetic minor
Solution: 2 steps
Reading level: Question and choices: about grade 6, 32 words.
Students, last 30 days: Not enough answers yet to show (it takes 10).

Why it is hard, traps and wrong answers (shows the answer)

Why it is hard

The numbers are small, but the speed is per hour and the answer is wanted in minutes, so students have to choose a route through the units. Finding the minutes per mile first, 4 at 15 miles an hour, turns the rest into a single multiplication. The wrong choices come from using a number in the stem as the answer, from mixing the 60 minutes with the 6 miles, or from rounding 0.4 hour to a half hour.

Something you must already know minor Working it out
Nothing on the page says that time is distance divided by speed or that an hour has 60 minutes, and the bold word minutes requires both. (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001)
Error-prone arithmetic minor Working it out
6 ÷ 15 is less than 1, 0.4 hour, and turning it into minutes means 0.4 × 60; the cleaner route, 60 ÷ 15 = 4 minutes a mile, avoids decimals. (Brown & Burton, 1978; Junker & Sijtsma, 2001)

Strategy: Find how many minutes Maria needs to ride one mile at 15 miles per hour, then multiply by the number of miles to school.

Traps

Numbers taken from the question: Combines the numbers in the question without a model of the situation, or is simply a number that appears in the question.
Rounds too early: Rounds a value partway through, or rounds the wrong way, so the final answer drifts from the exact one.

The wrong answers, classified

A Numbers taken from the question (Hegarty, Mayer & Monk, 1995)
Reveals a surface strategy Expected pull: weak
Divides the 60 minutes in an hour by the 6 miles, 60 ÷ 6 = 10, as if the ride took a full hour, and ignores the 15 mph speed.
B Numbers taken from the question (Hegarty, Mayer & Monk, 1995)
Reveals a surface strategy Expected pull: moderate
Takes the 15 in 15 miles per hour as the number of minutes, a number copied from the question without any calculation.
D Rounds too early (King et al., 2004)
Reveals partial knowledge Expected pull: moderate
Sees that 6 miles is a little under half of 15, rounds the time of 0.4 hour up to half an hour, and gives 30 minutes.

How the questions are analyzed, and the research behind it

Worked solution, step by step

Formulas used

Minutes for each mile: $\text{minutes per mile} = 60 \div \text{miles per hour}$; Miles per hour tells how many miles you ride in one hour, which is 60 minutes. Sharing the 60 minutes evenly among those miles gives the minutes for each mile. This works when the speed stays the same the whole time.
Distance, speed and time: $\text{time} = \text{distance} \div \text{speed}$; Distance is how far you go, here in miles. Speed is how far you go in one hour. Dividing the distance by the speed gives the time in hours.

Sort out the question
Maria rides at a constant speed of 15 miles per hour. Constant means it never changes. School is 6 miles away. You need the time in minutes, not hours. You must know that one hour has 60 minutes.
Find the minutes for one mile
15 miles per hour means Maria rides 15 miles in 60 minutes. Use the minutes-per-mile formula:
$60 \div 15 = 4$
So each mile takes Maria 4 minutes.
Find the minutes for 6 miles
Each of the 6 miles takes 4 minutes:
$6 \times 4 = 24$
So the ride takes 24 minutes.
Watch out: 15 is the speed, not a time, so choice B is a trap. And $60 \div 6 = 10$ , choice A, ignores the speed.
Choose the answer
Another way is the time formula. $6 \div 15 = 0.4$ , so the ride takes 0.4 of an hour. In minutes, that is $0.4 \times 60 = 24$ .
Watch out: rounding 0.4 hour up to half an hour gives choice D, 30.
So the answer is C, 24.

Check your answer

Check with the speed. 24 minutes is $\frac{24}{60} = \frac{2}{5}$ of an hour. In a full hour Maria rides 15 miles. So in 2/5 of an hour she rides $\frac{2}{5} \times 15 = 6$ miles. That is exactly the distance to school.

The original DOE question

Question 9 as shown on the DOE’s digital test, page 82 of its printable version. — As printed in the DOE’s printable version of 2026 Practice Test C Math, page 82, question 9.