Mr Richard cut an apple pie into equal sizes. He served 3 pieces for supper. Next day he and his daughter ate 2 pieces which was 2/5 of the leftovers. Into how many pieces had the pie been cut?

Answer 1

This is an interesting question, Puja.

Ok, let's take a look at what we know in this word problem and what is unknown.

3 pieces (eaten for supper)

2 pieces (eaten by Mr. Richard and his daughter)

Unknown number of pieces for leftovers

We know that what Mr. Richard and his daughter ate was 2/5 of the leftovers. We also know that they ate two slices. Making a diagram can help with these problems. If you lightly shaded in two parts of a rectangle divided into five equal parts, you would see that 2 is 2/5 of 5, so there must have been five slices of pie left over.

Ok, so now we know the following:

3 pieces for supper

5 pieces left over

If we add those together, we find that there were eight slices of pie.