Are you clear on unit conversion? Using my helpful word hints, you can see that “miles per hour” really means Miles / hours. So if I tell you you went 37 miles in 1.5 hours, then the calculation is easy: 37/1.5 = 24.7 mph.
But what if I said it was 50 minutes instead? Then you can still divide, but you’ll get – what, class? – yes, miles per minute. So you can either get miles/minute and convert it to MPH or you can convert 50 minutes to hours, then do the division. The choice is yours.
All you have to do is line up the units so that they cancel out and you’re left with what you want:
Miles/minute * minutes/ hour = miles/hour. Why did I choose min/hr and not hr/min, or something else? Because I want one “minute” on the top and one “minute” on the bottom so that they cancel.
Is that clear and easy enough? Do you understand that? It’s important for a lot of word problems.