Question 1171122: Imagine a Filipino family with seven members. The grandfather is 4 years older
than the grandmother, while the oldest son is 6 years older than his younger
brother and twice the age of the youngest sister. The wife of the oldest son is as old as him and their combined ages is 9 times the age of their child. If the youngest member is 8 times younger than the oldest member and it was 36 years ago when the grandparents had their first son, what is the present age of the grandmother ?
Found 2 solutions by ikleyn, greenestamps:
Answer by ikleyn(52775)   (Show Source):
Answer by greenestamps(13198)  (Show Source):
You can put this solution on YOUR website!
As tutor @ikleyn says in her response, working on a problem like this is a waste of time.
A good math problem should teach problem solving skills. A problem in which most of the effort required to solve the problem is in understanding the given information is more of a puzzle than it is a math problem.
And if one were to try to interpret the information that is given in this problem, he would run into a fatal flaw.
Part of the given information says that one person is "8 times younger than" another person.
That phrase makes no sense, either grammatically or mathematically.
There is no meaningful interpretation of a phrase like "one number is 8 times smaller than another", or "one person is 8 times younger than another".
Given a number x, "8 times smaller than" that number is x, minus 8x, which is -7x.
That makes, in this problem, one of the ages negative -- which is nonsense.
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