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| Question 1090467:   please help me with the equation:  Three partners, James, Jacob and Joshua, have an agreement which specifies that profits are to be divided as follows:
 Calculate each partner's share if the profit for a particular year was $60 000.
 James to receive $2 000 less than the total of Jacob and Joshua to receive 5 times as such as Jacob.
 Answer by greenestamps(13209)
      (Show Source): 
You can put this solution on YOUR website! "James to receive $2 000 less than the total of Jacob and Joshua to receive 5 times as much as Jacob."
 
 
 That statement does not make sense grammatically; there is no way to interpret it in a meaningful way.  I can make sense out of "James to receive $2 000 less than the total of Jacob and Joshua"; but then the rest of the sentence has no meaning.
 
 Take a look at it and see if you didn't leave something out, or in some other way not present the information correctly.
 
 
 
 
 Thanks for the clarification.  I suspected that was what you were trying to say, but I wasn't sure.
 
 So the amount James gets is 2000 less than the total the Jacob and Joshua get, and Joshua gets 5 times as much as Jacob.
 
 A formal algebraic solution might look like this:
 let x = amount Jacob gets
 then 5x = amount Joshua gets
 then 6x - 2000 = amount James gets
 
 The total is 60,000, so
 
  
  
  
  
 Having that amount turn out to be not a whole number is not pleasant....
 
 So the amounts each gets are
 Jacob: x = $5166.67
 Joshua: 5x = $25833.33
 James: 6x-2000 = $29000
 
 
 An informal solution is probably easier than that, especially since our value for x in the algebraic solution turned out not to be a whole number.
 
 James is to get $2000 less than the total that Jacob and Joshua get.  If he got exactly the same as the other two together, he would get $30000 and they together would get $30000.  But since he is to get $2000 less than the other two together, the $60000 would be divided with $29000 going to James and $31000 to the other two.
 
 So we already know the amount that James gets; then to finish the problem we just need to divide the $31000 that Jacob and Joshua get in such a way that Joshua gets 5 times as much as Jacob.
 
 Since Joshua gets 5 times as much as Jacob, the ratio is 5:1, which means Jacob gets 1/6 of the $31000, which is $5166.67, and Joshua gets the rest of the $31000, which is $25833.33.
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