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And here's your shmoop du jour brought to you by the scale of

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representation the doctor approved solution for body image issues [Man waiting with a nurse]

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everywhere all right what was the scale of representation in the House of

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Representatives when the Constitution was ratified and here are your answers.. all

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right a lot of fractions...All right well let's step on the scale and figure [Girl sat on a weighing scale in a bathroom]

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this sucker out the scale of representation basically means how many

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representatives there are in the house in comparison to how big the population

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is basically that the house represents right let's start by figuring out what [A weighing scale of representatives and population]

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the scale is today well there are 435 members of the House of Representatives

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and the US populations about 315 million so shmoop dogg what did that break [Snoop Dogg wearing graduation attire]

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down to hmm all right that's right one representative for every 700,000 people

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in the US we can go ahead and eliminate E..Now we know that there have been 435

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members in the house since 1929 that's when they stopped adding new members to [Lots of people gathered round a person signing a document]

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our lowdown legislative body but how many representatives were there when the

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Constitution was first ratified and how big was the population well the House

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passed a bill in 1791 saying that they would let a hundred five members pass [Men discussing a bill in an office]

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through their hallowed halls and the 1790 US Census and yeah they counted on

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those from the start since it was mandated in the Constitution and all

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revealed that the population was four million so if we divide four million by

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the hundred five representatives that means that way back then there was one

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representative for about every 38 thousand people and if we look at the

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remaining answers it appears B is the closest even if it [Letters A, B, C and D in a classroom]

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does force us to do a bit of rounding to that one forty thousands thing

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well the framers initially settled on this ratio because they wanted the house [People stood in the house of representatives]

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to be the most well, representative part of the government and they tried to

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keep the numbers low enough so people would have a chance to actually interact [A room filled with people]

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with their congressmen you know the original facetime

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