5th Grade Word Problem

[Guest]

A cooking school orders 3 bags of flour for its students. Each bag contains 20 pounds of flour. The school determines that each student will use 1/7 of the total pounds of flour ordered. How many students are there in the cooking school?

Choices are 8, 21, 140, 420

There is a debate that the correct answer is 7, which is not a choice, but also it comes down to 8 and 420, which both I can see.

[Guest]

I don't see how there can be any "debate" about it! If each student uses 1/7 of the flour then there must be 7 students.

[Guest]

Yeah, I also think the answer is 7 or there is a mistake.

[Guest]

Are you sure you quoted the problem correctly? If "each student uses 1/7 of of the total pounds of flour ordered" then there must be 7 students.

But if each student used 1/7 flour, then since there are 3(20)= 60 pounds of flour, there must be 7(60)= 420 students. That is one of the possible answers so either you misquoted the problem or it was written incorrectly.

[Guest]

A cooking school orders 3 bags of flour for its students. Each bag contains 20 pounds of flour. The school determines that each student will use 1/7 of the total pounds of flour ordered. How many students are there in the cooking school?

Choices are 8, 21, 140, 420

There is a debate that the correct answer is 7, which is not a choice, but also it comes down to 8 and 420, both I can see.

60 pounds of flour total. Students = 60÷(60/7) = 7 since each student receives 60 / 7  lb. The right response is 7, which is not one of the options (probably a mistake).