Please help now!

Question

“It’s simple,” said Jack. “I purchased a container of 500 sprinkles and there are 227 sprinkles left. So how many cookies did I make?” All Hannah could do was stare at her brother until she finally had the courage to say, “8?” “Nope,” replied Jack. “Not fair! You didn’t tell me how many sprinkles go into each cookie,” whined Hannah. “Fine,” said Jack. “I used a half-teaspoon of butter for each cookie, 7 chocolate chips in each cookie, and for each chocolate chip I used 3 sprinkles. I also put 2 raisins into each cookie.” How many cookies did Jack make?

Answer 1

Hello Jenson,

First, we must decide what is important information here, and what is not. I think Jack likes to say a lot that is really not important. (Or maybe he likes to throw his little sister off. What do you think? :)

Either way it is up to YOU to decide what really is important here.

For sure. it is important to know how many sprinkles Jack uses per cookie. With that we can figure out how many cookies he has made. To figure this out, we must also know that Jack used 7 chocolate chips per cookie AND he used 3 sprinkles for each chocolate chip. Knowing this gives us how many total sprinkles Jack used for each cookie.

So, for sprinkles- Jack used 3 sprinkles times 7 chocolate chips

7 X 3= 21 sprinkles per cookie

(Jack is very exact with those sprinkles, is he not?)

But the question wants to know how many cookies Jack made, To get this, the next step is to know the total amount of sprinkles Jack actually used. To figure that our we can take the total sprinkles he started with and subtract how many he had left. Then we know how many sprinkles Jack actually used.

500 - 227 = 273

So, Jack used a total of 273 sprinkles.

(Does this all make sense to you so far?)

Now we can move on to getting the number of total cookies Jack made. To get this we can divide the total sprinkles Jack used by how many sprinkles he used per cookie.

273 / 21 = 13

So Jack made 13 cookies.

Do we need to know about the butter here? Nope. Do we need to know about the raisins? Nope. This kind of "trick" does happen sometimes in math word problems.

So be careful not to let anyone fool you with a bunch of unimportant information. :)

Answer 2

An exerise in deleting irrelevant information!

3 sprinkles per chocolate chip, 7 chocoate chips per cookie = 21 sprinkles per cookie.

(500 - 227) / 21 = ?