Final answer:
After subtracting the number of students who rode in cars from the total number of students, the result was divided by the number of buses to determine that each bus had around 23 or 24 students.
Step-by-step explanation:
To find out how many students were in each bus, we start by subtracting the number of students who rode in cars from the total number of students going on the field trip. With 131 students in total and 14 in cars, that leaves us with 131 - 14 = 117 students who took the buses. Since these 117 students were spread out over 5 buses, we divide the number of students by the number of buses to get the number of students per bus.
117 ÷ 5 = 23.4
However, since you can't have a fraction of a student, we interpret this result to mean that the buses had either 23 or 24 students in them. In real-world terms, there could be 4 buses with 23 students and 1 bus with 25 students, or some other similar arrangement, but each bus had around 23 or 24 students.