ShmoopTube

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Incoming Shmoopy question at five o'clock! Everyone duck.

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If 3/5 of the students in a class are male, and there are twelve females in the class, how many males are there?

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We’ve got male… the question is: how many?

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Before we find out how many males there are, we need to

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calculate how many students there are in the entire class.

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If three-fifths of the students in a class are male,

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it means that two-fifths of the students in the class are female—

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Since we already know the total number of females,

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we can put together a little equation to figure out the total number of students:

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2/5 times the total number of students in the class equals 12.

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Multiply both sides by the reciprocal of 2/5…

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…and we find that there are 30 students in the class.

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Now, all we need to find is 3/5 of 30.

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Multiply 30 by 3/5 to get that there are 18 males in the class.

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That's it.

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