A book sold 36,600 copies in its first month of release. Suppose this represents 7.1% of the number of copies sold to date. How many copies have been sold to date?

515,493 copies sold

Step-by-step explanation:

Since this is a ratio problem and we have three values and one variable that we need to find (copies sold to date) then we can use the Rule of three to solve this problem. We simply need to multiply the diagonal values and divide by the third value to get the variable. This can be seen below...

36,600 copies   <>   7.1%

    x  copies   <>  100%

(36,600 * 100) / 7.1 = 515,492.96  

Since the number of books cannot be a decimal we must round up to the nearest book sold, which would mean that the number of copies sold to date is 515,493 copies sold