How Much Does the Youngest Boy Get?Date: 05/25/2000 at 19:33:55 From: Joshua Subject: Word Problems Five brothers, each born in a different year, share a gift of $100 according to the following arrangement: each boy except the youngest gets $5 more than his next younger brother. How much does the youngest boy get? Date: 05/26/2000 at 03:01:00 From: Doctor Jesse Subject: Re: Word Problems Hi, Josh. The trick to most word problems is trying to turn the words into an equation. Once you have the equation, things are pretty easy (most of the time). Let's look at what we have. Five brothers are splitting $100... So, we could say something like: a + b + c + d + e = 100 But that doesn't do us much good on its own. We need to know how much the youngest boy got. But we have more information, which we can use to modify our equation. If the youngest boy is a , and the next youngest is b , etc., then we know that: b = a + 5 c = b + 5 d = c + 5 e = d + 5 This gives us the ability to put everything in terms of a ... b is already that way: b = a + 5 Now, c = b + 5, or (a + 5) + 5, so c = a + 10. Get it? It is pretty easy to see that: d = a + 15 and e = a + 20 So now you can turn: a + b + c + d + e = 100 into: a + (a + 5) + (a + 10) + (a + 15) + (a + 20) = 100 And I'll let you take it from there... Good luck - you can do it. - Doctor Jesse, The Math Forum http://mathforum.org/dr.math/ |
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