Question

The wind blew away 20 of your muffins. That was 5/8 of all of them! With how many did you start?

Answer 1

You started with 32 muffins.


`(20 \: muffins)/(total \: muffins) = (5)/(8)`
You can use either cross multiplication

`5 * (total \: muffins) = 8 * 20 \: muffins \\ 5x = 160 \\ x = 160 / 5 = 32 \: total \: muffins`
You can also show that you can get to 20 muffins by multiplying 5 by 4. In order to keep the fraction equal, you would also have to multiply 8 × 4 = 32 total muffins.