to determine the number of catfish in a pond, a game warden catches 131 catfish, tags them and throws them back into the pond. later, 20 catfish are caught, 10 of them are tagged. How many catfish would the game warden expect to be in the pond?

131/10 20/x

1 answer

Assuming you meant

131/10 = 20/x
that would give you
131x = 20*10
x = 1.5

What can that mean? The ratios do not seem intuitive to me. I would have reasoned this way:

Of the sample caught, 10/20 were tagged. We can expect that the same fraction of the total population was tagged. In other words,

10/20 = 131/x
10x = 20*131
x = 262