Answer:
Ric is 7 years old.
Explanation:
Choose variables for everyone's ages. I'll choose
for Ric's age,
for Paul's age, and
for Tom's age.
Since Ric's age is half of Paul's age, we can write this equation:

Since Tom is two years younger than Paul, we can write this equation:

Since the sum of all their ages is 33 years, we can write this equation:

Since we know
and
in terms of
, we can replace them in the equation above as follows:

Now we can solve for
to find
later:

Now that we know that
, we can substitute 14 for
in the equation
:

Ric is 7 years old.