Question

A debate competition has participants from three different schools: 15 from James Elementary, 18 from George Washington University, and 12 from the MLK Jr. Academy. All teams must have the same number of students. Each team can have only students from the same school. How many students can be on each team?

Answer 1

Is the answer not 12?

If their only limitation is that they need equal numbers then it they can have 12.

Even though JE and GWU and more then 12 students they arent allowed to swap so the maximum that MLK Jr can have is only ever going to be 12

Answer 2

The number of students in each team can be : 3

Explanation:

Since we have to form teams such that two conditions must be satisfied:

• All teams must have equal number of students.
• Each team can have only student from the same school.

Now on the basis of the above conditions to be satisfied we see that we can form "12 teams" such that each team must have "three students" from three different schools.

Hence, the number of students each team could have is 3.