A young girl pours 23 blue beads and 16 yellow beads into a bowl. She divides the total into 3 equal parts, removes some beads from each part, and doubles the rest to have 6 beads in each part now. How many beads were removed from each part?
Thoughts? Step-by-step reasoning:
There are 23 + 16 = 39 beads in the bowl. Dividing them into 3 equal parts give 39 / 3 = 13 beads each. Before doubling the number of beads, she had 6 / 2 = 3 beads left in each part. Therefore she had removed 13 - 3 = 10 beads from each part.
Thus, the answer is 10.