Several contestants are in a chocolate-bunny eating contest. After 20 minutes of stuffing their faces, all of the bunnies have been eaten.
One of the contestants remarks, “Isn’t it interesting that there were 7 times as many bunnies as contestants, but each of us ate a different number of bunnies?”
Another contestant replies, “That certainly is interesting. I always eat the ears first and I noticed that when we had eaten a third of the bunnies that there were 4 fewer than 10 times as many bunny ears as human noses in the contest.”
How many bunnies and contestants were in the contest?
Answer
42 bunnies and 6 contestants.
From what the first contestant says, we know:
Bunnies = 7Contestants From the second contestant we know: 2(2/3)Bunnies = 10Contestants – 4
Just plug the first equation into the second equation and you can solve for Contestants, of which there are 6. Plug this back into the first equation to determine that there are 42 bunnies.