Question

Twenty-seven members of a West Virginia diet club celebrated the combined loss of 500 pounds by devouring a very large salad. The salad took two hours to prepare and four hours to eat. In fact, the salad was mixed in a swimming pool and included 890 individual vegetable. There were six times as many carrots as heads of lettuce and there were ten more cucumbers than heads of lettuce.

If a head of lettuce weighs two pounds, a carrot weighs four ounces, and a cucumber weighs one pound, how much did the total salad weigh?

Answer 1

L = heads of lettuce
r = carrots
u = cucumbers

L + r + u = 890 ... r = 6L ... u = L + 10

substituting ... L + 6L + L + 10 = 890

solve for L , substitute back for r and u

plug in the individual weights to find the total weight