The Rock Pool

Untitled from Team 5 PES on Vimeo.
Some octopuses, some fish and a few 
mermaids were happily frolicking in a rock 
pool. Altogether there were 38 arms, 24 eyes 
and 8 tails all swimming in the pool. 
How many mermaids were there?

We were given a task to find how many of each creatures there were from the question we had to answer. Mermaids, Octopus and Fishes were having fun in the rock pool. So there were 38 arms, 24 eyes and 8 tails.  We first started by using the easiest body part which were the eyes. We had to answer the question of how many Mermaids that were in the rock pool.  Each creature had 2 eyes so we divided 24 by 2 which was 12 so we now know that there were 12 creatures all together. Next we started which the tails. There were 8 tails and 2 of the creatures which were mermaids and fish with them. Now we know that there are only 8 creatures with tails and obviously octopuses don’t have tails so there is 4 Octopuses because there were 4 left from the 12. But to make us sure that there were 4 Octopuses, we next used the arms as part of our second body part. Octopus have 8 arms so we used 8 (Octopuses) times 4 which was 32 and 38-32 equal 6. Fish don’t have arms and of course Mermaid’s do so we divided 6 by 2 which was 3. So far we’ve got 4 Octopus and 3 Mermaids which also answers the question of how many Mermaids there were. Still, we’ve got 5 more tails which is for the fishes because three of the tails have been subtracted and used for the Mermaid. 3 Mermaids and 5 more tails meaning there were 5 fishes.

So 5 (fishes) + 3 (mermaids) + 4 (Octopus) = 12