SOLUTION: 3. A sports team is taken to a competition in p cars. Each car contains 4 members of the team, except for the last car which only contains 1 team member. a) Write an expression fo

Question 1190071: 3. A sports team is taken to a competition in p cars. Each car contains 4 members of the team, except for the last car which only contains 1 team member.
a) Write an expression for the number of people in the team.
b) The manager checks names off as car arrive and all 17 players arrive. Write and solve an equation to find out how many cars were full.
c) How many cars were used in total?

Answer by Theo(13342) (Show Source): You can put this solution on YOUR website!
p = the number of cars.
each car contains 4 members except the last car which contains 1.
the number of people in the cars is 4 * (p - 1) + 1.
the equation for the number of cars required to carry 17 team members is 17 = 4 * (p - 1) + 1.
subtract 1 from both sides of this equation to get 16 = 4 * (p - 1).
divide both sides of this equation by 4 to get 4 = p - 1
add 1 to both sides of this equation to get 5 = p.
the number of cars is 5.
17 = 4 * (p - 1) + 1 becomes 17 = 4 * (5 - 1) + 1 which becomes 17 = 4 * 4 + 1 which becomes 17 = 16 + 1 which becomes 17 = 17.
this confirms p = 5 as the number of cars is good.
the number of cars that were full is 5 - 1 = 4.
1 of the cars only carried one team member, so the total number of cars required was 5.

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