Claire works at the local college and is making up bags of free items to give away at an open evening next term.
She has:
140 discount vouchers, 56 pencils, 280 sweets to share between all the bags.
She uses all the vouchers, all the pencils and all the sweets.
Claire makes as many bags as possible.
The contents of each bag are the same.
How many bags does Claire make?
Answer:
56 does not divide into 140 but 28 goes into both 140 and 280. 28 is the largest possible factor of 56 that goes into both numbers.
Therefore, there must be 2 pencils, 5 vouchers and 10 sweets in each bag – found by dividing each 140 and 280 by 28.
Since there are only 56 pencils, 28 is the maximum possible number of bags.