Ms. Murray owns an ice cream shop. She keeps track of how many bottles of caramel syrup and chocolate syrup she uses per week. Last week, Ms. Murray used 72 bottles of chocolate syrup. She used 8 times as many bottles of chocolate syrup as bottles of caramel syrup.

Question

Ms. Murray owns an ice cream shop. She keeps track of how many bottles of caramel syrup and chocolate syrup she uses per week. Last week, Ms. Murray used 72 bottles of chocolate syrup. She used 8 times as many bottles of chocolate syrup as bottles of caramel syrup.
How many bottles of caramel syrup did Ms. Murray use?

GPT-4o mini · Answer

Let $ c $ represent the number of bottles of caramel syrup used last week. According to the information given, Ms. Murray used 8 times as many bottles of chocolate syrup as bottles of caramel syrup. Therefore, we can express this relationship as: $$ \text{Bottles of chocolate syrup} = 8 \times \text{Bottles of caramel syrup} $$ From the problem, we know that Ms. Murray used 72 bottles of chocolate syrup. So we can set up the equation: $$ 72 = 8c $$ To find the number of bottles of caramel syrup ($ c $), we need to solve for $ c $ by dividing both sides of the equation by 8: $$ c = \frac{72}{8} $$ Calculating the right side gives: $$ c = 9 $$ Thus, Ms. Murray used $\boxed{9}$ bottles of caramel syrup last week.