Jack's mother gave him 50 chocolates to give to his friends at his birthday party. He gave 3 chocolates to each of his friends and still had 2 chocolates left. How many friends were at Jack's party?

1 Answer
yungching
May 7, 2016

16

Explanation:

Okay so Jack started with 50 chocolates, and ended with 2.
The simple way to calculate it would be by realising that Jack only distributed 48 chocolates. We can find how many times 3 fits into 48 by dividing #48-:3=16#.

Using algebra, we substitute the value we want to find with #x#. Here what we want to find is the number of friends that were at Jack's party.

We know that he started with 50 chocolates, then distributed #3 xx# the number of friends present (which is #x#).
We write that down as #50 - 3x#
(It's minus because when chocolates are distributed, Jack is taking away from what he has.)

We know that after this, there were only 2 chocolates left, so it's
#50-3x=2#

Then we proceed by moving all the numbers to the right until only #x# is left:

#-3x=2-50#
#-3x=-48#

#x=(-48)/-3#

#x=16#

Conclusion: The number of people that attended the party was 16.

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