Problem number 17. On a farm there are only sheep and cows. The number of sheep is 8 more than the number of cows. The number of cows is half the number of sheep. How many animals are on the farm? A, 16. B, 18. C, 20. D, 24. E, 28. We know two things from this problem. The first is that there are 8 more sheep than cows. The second is that the number of cows is half the number of sheep or there are twice as many sheep as cows. First of all we know that there are 8 more sheep than cows. This means that we have a certain number of cows and for each one of those cows there's a sheep and then in addition there are 8 more sheep, 8 of them here. The other part of the information from the problem tells us that there are twice as many sheep as cows. The number of cows in this group is the same as the number of sheep in this group. So if this group of cows is half the number of sheep that means that this group of sheep is half the number of sheep. If this is one half of the sheep then the remaining sheep that we have here is the other half of the sheep because we need two halves to make a whole. Since we know that there are 8 sheep in this group we know that half of the sheep is 8. Therefore altogether there will be 16 sheep. Also if there are half as many cows as sheep there will be 8 cows. Now we just need to add the number of sheep and cows together. 16 plus 8 will give us 6 plus 8 is 14. Carry the 1. 1 plus 1 is 2. There are altogether 24 animals at the farm. So answer D, 24 is the correct answer.

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