Question

1. Camp Pineview's cook, Maggie Johnson, was just about to begin preparing the picnic lunch for all the campers. She already knew she needed to fill out 55 bowls of the same size and capacity with the same amount of food. When she was done, she decided to read the guidelines for the picnic. The guidelines read: a. Every camper gets their own bowl of soup. b. Every 2 campers will get 1 bowl of spaghetti to share. c. Every 3 campers will get 1 bowl of salad to share. How many campers are going to the picnic?

Answer 1

30

Explanation:

So based on the information provided, we can make the following equation in order to solve for the number of campers going to the picnic which is represented by x

`55 = 1x + 0.5x + 0.3x`

Ok, so lets explain. There are a total of 55 bowls of food made by the cook. Every single camper gets a bowl of soup meaning 100% of them which we can simplify as 1. Next we see that 1 of every 2 campers gets spaghetti meaning there is a bowl of spaghetti for half of the campers, thus 50% or 0.5. And lastly there is 1 salad bowl for every 3 campers (1/3 = 33% = 0.33). Now that we understand that we can solve for x by adding all the common factors and dividing isolating the variable like so...

`55 = 1x + 0.5x + 0.3x`

`55 = 1.83x` ... now divide both sides by 1.83

`30 = x`

We can see that there are a total of 30 campers going to the picnic.