A small zoo houses a variety of 68 wild animals. After they send a gorilla family of six to a different zoo, they adopt a hippopotamus from another zoo. A while later, an animal rescue contacted them, and the zoo took in three endangered rhinos. Then one of their lionesses gave birth to cubs, and they opened a meerkat exhibit with twice as many meerkats as they had gained lion cubs. The zoo then had 90 animals in all. How many lion cubs were born at the zoo? Give me reasons, before answering the question
Let C be the number of lion cubs. There are 2C meerkats in the new exhibit. The zoo sent 4 gorillas away, so they had 68 - 6 = 62 animals left. They adopted a hippopotamus, so they had 62 + 1 = 63 animals. They took in 3 rhinos, so they had 63 + 3 = 66 animals. Thus, they had 90 - 66 = 24 new lion cubs and meerkats. Therefore, they had C + 2C = 3C = 24 new lion cubs as meerkats. Hence, there were C = 24 / 3 = 8 lion cubs born. So the final answer is 8.