The music teacher would like to have the same number of girls and of boys in the chorus. She finds that 5/8 of the chorus are girls but that if she can get 10 more boys, the chorus will have the same number of boys as of girls.

Question

(a) How many students are in the chorus?
(b) If there are 178 children in the school, which unit fraction would you select to represent the fraction of students in the present chorus? (Round the number of students in the chorus to the nearest ten. Round the number of students in the school to the nearest hundred.)

Answer 1

if 5/8 are girls, then 3/8 are boys

let the number of girls be 5x , and the number of boys be 3x

5x = 3x + 10
2x = 10
x = 5

number of girls is 25 and boys is 15
total in chorus is 40

fraction of chorus kids to whole student body
= 40/178 = 20/89

I don't get the point of the "unit fraction" calculation in this question.
As I understand it, a unit fraction has a 1 in the numerator, so

1/(89/20) = appr 1/4 ???

or appr 40/200 = 1/(200/40) = 1/5 if we round 178 to 200

your pick.

Answer 2

hjd