SOLUTION: Hi Mary and Gary had some stickers in the ratio of 5 to 3 respectively. After mary had given 1/3 of her stickers to Gary the new ratio of Gary to Mary became 7 to 5. If Gary had 3

Question 1205027: Hi
Mary and Gary had some stickers in the ratio of 5 to 3 respectively. After mary had given 1/3 of her stickers to Gary the new ratio of Gary to Mary became 7 to 5. If Gary had 32 more stickers than Mary what was the combined total.
Thanks
Answer by greenestamps(13200) (Show Source): You can put this solution on YOUR website!

This would be a much more interesting problem, open to a large number of different solution methods, if it asked us to find the number of stickers each of them had at the beginning.

However, since the problem only asked for the total number of stickers, there seems to be one path to the solution that is by far the easiest.

After Mary gave 1/3 of her stickers to Gary, the ratio of Gary to Mary was 7:5 and Gary had 32 more stickers than Mary. Given that ratio 7:5...

Let 7x = Gary's stickers
Let 5x = Mary's stickers

(That is one standard way of setting up a problem when a ratio is given; whatever value x has, the ratio 7x:5x is always 7:5.)

Gary had 32 more stickers than Mary:

7x-5x=32
2x=32
x=16

And the total numer of stickers was 7x+5x = 12x = 192.

ANSWER: 192

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