A car repair shop offers its customers free coffee while they wait. By the end of each day, the coffee urn, which had started out with 7 1/4 gallons of coffee, was left with 2 1/12 gallons. How many gallons of coffee had been dispensed?

Answer: 5.1667 gallons of coffee had been dispensed

Step-by-step explanation:

Let x represent the number of gallons of coffee that had been dispensed.

By the end of each day, the coffee urn, which had started out with 7 1/4 gallons of coffee, was left with 2 1/12 gallons. This means that the initial number of gallons of coffee was 7 1/4 = 7.25 gallons

The amount left after dispense x gallons is 2 1/12 = 2.0833 gallons.

Therefore,

x + 2.0833 = 7.25

x = 7.25 - 2.0833 = 5.1667 gallons