Charlie has a lot of baseball cards, Maggie has 2 times less cards. Together they have 480 cards. How many cards does Charlie have?

Question

Hint: you might write and solve an equation in order to solve this problem

Answer 1

I would interpret this question to mean that Maggie has only 1/2 as many cards as Charlie. This is equivalent to saying that Charlie has twice as many cards as Maggie.

You could write this this way

Charlies' cards + Maggie's cards = 480

or

(Maggie's cards + Maggie's cards) + Maggies's cards = 480

3 * Maggie's cards = 480 means Maggie's cards = 160 and then Charlies's cards = 160+160 = 320