Mrs brown wants to cook five dishes on a stove with two burners. The time she needs to cook each dish are 40 minutes, 15 minutes, 35 minutes, 10 minutes, and 45 mins. What is the least amount of time she needs to cook all five dishes. Once she start cooking a dish she leaves it until its fonish

80 minutes

Step-by-step explanation:

Optimization

Everything needed to get the best or most effective use of a situation or limited resource.

This problem requires us to distribute discrete times into two different places, in this case, two burners.

The solution reduces to find the best possible combination of the numbers 10, 15, 35, 40, and 45, so the sum of them in two parallel processes is minimum.

Adding up all of them we get 10+15+35+40+45=145. Dividing by 2 we get 72.5. If we could distribute those numbers to get 72.5 in each process, we would get the minimum. But we cannot reach that perfect solution, only multiples of 5 are provided.

Trying first with the biggest numbers we get

45+40=85

45+35=80

45+15=60

From all those combinations, the closest possible to 72.5 is 45+35=80

Adding up the remaining numbers: 40+15+10=70

Using this solution, the least amount of time needed to cook the dishes would be 80 minutes