trying to figure out how to do this word problem.

Question

There are 50 chairs in a room.All of them are either red or blue. There are 17 more blue chairs than twice the number of red ones. How many red chairs are there?

Answer 1

Hi eric, 

 

I believe that the answer to your question can be defined in a few simple steps.

 

1) First, you are trying to find out how many red chairs there are, therefore, we will label the red chairs as "x"

2) Second, they are telling you that there are "17 more than twice the number of red ones" . This means that the equation would be 17+2x+x=50. seventeen more (+) blue chairs than twice (2x) the number of red ones (x), and this would all equal 50, because that is the total of chairs that you are given. S

3) Lastly, solve for x and you should come up with x=11

 

So you have 11 red chairs. You can check your work by plugging in the number into the formula

 

17+2(11)+11=50

 

Hope this helped!

Answer 2

Hi Eric

 

You can set this problem up with representing the # of red chairs as X.  Then the given information allows you to obtain that the number of blue chairs is given by the expression, 2X + 17

 

Then the total number of chairs, 50 is given by the expression

 

50 = x + (2x+17)

 

Solving for x gives the number of red chairs.

Answer 3

Hi!

 

It seems like you may need to set up a system of equations for this problem.

 

Let's say that x= the number of red chairs and y=the number of blue chairs.

 

We know that there are 50 chairs total, so we can accurately say that

x + y = 50

 

We also know that there are 17 more blue chairs than twice the number of red ones. Keeping in mind that x is the number of red chairs, we can say that 

y = 2x + 17

 

So now we have a system of equations 

 

x + y = 50

y = 2x + 17

 

You should be able to solve the question from here.