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Sean has 8 jolly ranchers and Ruth has 18 chocolate bars. How many of each piece would each child need to make party bags with equal amounts of jolly ranchers and chocolate bars?

User Winfried
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Final answer:

To create party bags with an equal amount of candies, we could use 1 Jolly Rancher and 1 chocolate bar per bag, resulting in 8 bags with Sean's candies all used up and Ruth having 10 chocolate bars left over.

Step-by-step explanation:

The question involves determining how many Jolly Ranchers and chocolate bars need to be in each party bag to ensure that both include an equal amount. Sean has 8 Jolly Ranchers and Ruth has 18 chocolate bars. To make bags with equal amounts of each, we can find the greatest common divisor (GCD) of 8 and 18, which will tell us the largest number of items per bag possible for both types of candy while keeping the counts equal.

The GCD of 8 and 18 is 2. This means that each party bag could have 2 Jolly Ranchers and 2 chocolate bars. However, we can easily see that we cannot use all of the candies as 2 does not divide into 18 evenly. Since there is no higher number that divides into both 8 and 18, we have to use the next best option, which is 1 candy per bag. So each party bag would have 1 Jolly Rancher and 1 chocolate bar, and we would make 8 bags in total because Sean only has 8 Jolly Ranchers. This will leave Ruth with 10 leftover chocolate bars.

User Skarface
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