Question

5. Buy 2 and Get 1 FREE! Mrs Chua wants to spend the least amount of money to buy 25 cupcakes for a party. Each cupcake cost $m. How much did she pay? Express your answer in terms m​

Answer 1

If Mrs Chua wants to buy 25 cupcakes, we can take advantage of the "Buy 2 and Get 1 Free" promotion and divide the cupcakes into groups of 3. For every 3 cupcakes that she buys, she only pays for 2, which means she gets 1 cupcake for free. This means that for every group of 3 cupcakes, she only pays for 2 cupcakes, or $\frac{2}{3}$ of the total price.

Let's first find out how many groups of 3 cupcakes she needs to buy in order to get 25 cupcakes. We can divide 25 by 3 to get:

`\begin{align}(25)/(3) &= 8 (1)/(3)</p><p>\end{align}`

This means that she needs to buy 8 groups of 3 cupcakes and 1 extra cupcake.

To minimize the amount of money that Mrs Chua spends, we want to take advantage of the "Buy 2 and Get 1 Free" promotion as much as possible. So we want to make sure that we only pay full price for the last cupcake.

Therefore, Mrs Chua should buy 8 groups of 3 cupcakes (i.e., 24 cupcakes) and then pay full price for the last cupcake. This means that she pays for 16 cupcakes, but gets 8 cupcakes for free (because of the "Buy 2 and Get 1 Free" promotion).

So the total cost for the 25 cupcakes is:

`\begin{align}\text{Total cost} &= \text{Cost of 16 cupcakes} + \text{Cost of 1 cupcake}\ &= \left((2)/(3) * 16\right)m + 1m\ &= (32)/(3)m + 1m\ &= (35)/(3)m\end{align}`

Therefore, Mrs Chua pays $\frac{35}{3}m$ to buy 25 cupcakes using the "Buy 2 and Get 1 Free" promotion.

Answer 2

If Mrs. Chua wants to buy 25 cupcakes, she can take advantage of the "buy 2 and get 1 free" offer.

This means that for every 3 cupcakes, she only pays the price of 2 cupcakes.

So, the total number of cupcake sets that she needs to buy is 25 divided by 3, which gives 8 with a remainder of 1.

Therefore, she needs to pay for 8 sets of cupcakes, and she will get 2 cupcakes for free since she gets 1 free cupcake for every 2 cupcakes.

So the total number of cupcakes she paid for is 8 x 2 + 2 = 18.

The cost of one cupcake is $m, so the total cost of 18 cupcakes is 18 x $m = $18m.

Therefore, Mrs. Chua paid $18m for 25 cupcakes.