Question

Niel has a bucket of beads. He uses them to make 8 identical necklaces and then buys 25 beads at the store. He ends up with a total of 500 beads. How many did he start with? Identify the operations needed to solve this problem using the equation b/8 + 25 = 500

Answer 1

To solve this problem, we can use the equation b/8 + 25 = 500, where b represents the number of beads Neil started with.

Firstly, we need to isolate the variable b to find its value. We can do this by subtracting 25 from both sides of the equation:

b/8 + 25 - 25 = 500 - 25

This simplifies to:

b/8 = 475

Next, to solve for b, we can multiply both sides of the equation by 8:

8 * (b/8) = 475 * 8

This simplifies to:

b = 3800

Therefore, Neil started with 3800 beads.