Amjed has 223 cards in his trading card collection. Latif has 8.741 cards in his trading card collection. Using the orders of
magnitude, about how many times more trading cards does Latif
have than Amjed?

The orders of magnitude are numbers of the form:

10^n

where n can be any integer number.

So we can write something like:

"A is n orders of magnitude above B

Now we have the quantities:

Amjed cards = 223

Latif cards = 8741

We want to find how many times more trading cards does Latif  have than Amjed.

Then we need to look at the quotient between the number of cards of Latif and Amjed.

8741/223 = 39.2

Now we need to approximate this to the nearest 10^n number.

(..., 0.1, 1, 10, 100, 1000, ...)

The nearest one to 39.2 is 10.

So we can say that Latif's collection is 10.

and 10 = 10^1

then n = 1

Then we can say that Latif's collection is one order of magnitude above Amjed's collection.

x is the total time in minutes for the free response

you are given number of questions as 15 - m and time per item as 8 minutes

to find x multiply the two givens together:

x = 8 * (15-m) = 8(15-m)