There were a total of 107 students and chaperones on a field trip to the museum. If the number of chaperones was thirteen less than seven times the number of students, what is the number of students?

1 Answer
May 9, 2018

There are 92 chaperones and 15 students.

Explanation:

So I'll set up an equation to help solve this, with s for students and c for chaperones.

c=7s13
s+c=107
s+(7s13)=107

The bottom equation is essentially saying that students plus chaperones (which equals 13 less than 7 times the number of students) equals 107 people.

You can remove the parentheses from this equation:

s+7s13=107

And combine like terms:

8s=120

And divide both sides by 8:

8s8=1208

To get:

s=15

Because c=7s13, you can plug in 15 in for s to get:

c=7(15)13
c=10513
c=92

And to double check:

92+15=107

Meaning that there are 92 chaperones and 15 students. Not sure why there are so many chaperones for so few students, but there we are.