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This actually makes sense if you trade out rounding for significant figures in the instructions. You’d get the same reasonable answer of 13 at the end. I suspect significant figures aren’t taught at the 5th grade level, but it would be a great real world problem for later grades.
It’s not ‘bonkers’ just poorly written. In this mathematical situation the answer to “How many one gallon cans of paint do you need to paint 37 walls?” is 13. Common sense says this would be what the problem is “trying” to ask. It’s just poorly written.
Either the instructions need to be rewritten to specify rounding the product to the nearest whole number (which gives you the ‘right’ answer, but would ignore the ‘real’ reason for rounding up).
Or the instructions can stay the same and the problem needs to be rewritten as a simple calculation.
You cannot BOTH round each number AND get a logical answer to the question as posed. 🤷🏻♀️
Math books are not written by actual math teachers at that grade level. It's pretty obvious when you see a problem like that.