Question

At a party, the amount of people who ate meatballs was 9 less than 3/5 of the total number of people. The number of people who ate meatballs was 24. How many people where at the party? Write an equation to help you solve the problem. Let x represent the number of people at the party.

Answer 1

there were a total of 55 people at the party.

Explanation:

In order to create the equation representing this scenario we first need to represent each step in a formula. Since the total number of people is represented by x we can multiply 3/5 by x and subtract 9 from that. This would then be equal to 24 like so...

3/5x - 9 = 24

Now that we have the formula we can perform opposite operations to isolate x and solve for it.

3/5x - 9 = 24 ... add 9 on both sides

3/5x = 33 ... divide both sides by 3/5

x = 55

Finally, we can see that there were a total of 55 people at the party.