Question

LaShawn 171 tokens playing basketball at the county fair at school. She gave three tokens to every student in her math class. She only has five tokens remaining.

Answer 1

To find out how many students are in LaShawn's math class, we can set up the problem as follows:

1. **Initial tokens:** LaShawn starts with 171 tokens.
2. **Remaining tokens:** She has 5 tokens left after giving some away.
3. **Tokens given away:** The number of tokens she gave away can be calculated as follows:

\[
\text{Tokens given away} = \text{Initial tokens} - \text{Remaining tokens} = 171 - 5 = 166.
\]

4. **Tokens per student:** LaShawn gave 3 tokens to each student in her math class.

5. **Number of students:** Let \( n \) be the number of students in her math class. The total tokens given away (166) can be expressed in terms of the number of students:

\[
3n = 166.
\]

6. **Solving for \( n \):**

\[
n = \frac{166}{3} \approx 55.33.
\]

Since the number of students must be a whole number, we can conclude that LaShawn cannot give exactly 3 tokens to an integer number of students with the remaining tokens. So, there may be a mistake in the scenario, or not all tokens are perfectly allocated to her class in multiples of 3.

However, if we are looking for the number of students based on how many she would have given 3 tokens to (without needing a whole number), we can state:

LaShawn gave away 166 tokens total, which means she attempted to share them with 55 students (as that is the largest whole number she could give 3 tokens to without exceeding her tokens available).

So, while we cannot give a precise whole number answer due to the fractional student, LaShawn was able to give tokens to approximately 55 students in practice.