Final answer:
Tara used 18 cups of sugar in her 30 cups of donut topping, following a ratio of 3:2 of sugar to cinnamon.
Step-by-step explanation:
The student is dealing with a problem on the topic of ratios in Mathematics. The question asks how much sugar Tara used for her donut topping when she mixed sugar and cinnamon in a ratio of 3:2 and made a total of 30 cups of the mixture.
To solve this, we can represent the amount of sugar as 3x and the amount of cinnamon as 2x. Because the total mixture is 30 cups, we can write the equation 3x + 2x = 30 to find the value of x. Adding together the parts of the ratio (3 + 2), we get 5x = 30. When we divide both sides of the equation by 5, we find that x = 6. Hence, the amount of sugar, which is 3 times x, would be 3 * 6 = 18 cups.