Carmen is preparing dinner plates for a row of customers at the counter in a diner. She likes to put a couple of sprigs of parsley on each plate for decoration. However, she is very low on parsley and doesn't have enough to even put 1 sprig on every plate, so she needs to break several of the parsley sprigs in two to make 2 smaller ones to stretch them out. If she decorates 8 plates with one whole parsley sprig and 12 plates with 1/2 a sprig each, how many sprigs of parsley does she have left if she started with 25?
Thoughts? Step-by-step reasoning:
Carmen decorates 8 plates with 1 whole sprig of parsley, 8 plates x 1 parsley sprig each = 8 parsley sprigs. She also decorates 12 plates with 1 / 2 a sprig each, 12 x 1 / 2 = 6 parsley sprigs. She started with 25 parsley sprigs and has used 8 + 6 = 14 parsley sprigs. After using 14 parsley sprigs, she has 25 - 14 = 11 sprigs left.
Thus, the answer is 11.