The diver collected water samples at every 3 meters, starting from 5 meters below the water surface, up to a final depth of 35 meters.
We can find the number of samples collected by dividing the total depth range by the distance between each sample and then adding 1 to include the first sample.
The total depth range is:
35 m - 5 m = 30 m
The distance between each sample is 3 m, so the number of samples is:
(30 m) / (3 m/sample) + 1 = 10 + 1 = 11
Therefore, the diver collected a total of 11 water samples.