Problem number 24, John and Olivia exchanged sweets. First, John gave Olivia as many sweets as Olivia had. Then Olivia gave John as many sweets as John had after the first exchange. After the two exchanges, each had four sweets. How many sweets did John have at the beginning? A, six, B, five, C, four, D, three, E, two. If we are given a problem that talks about exchanges or one person giving things to another, and we are told how many things a person ended up with at the end and we need to find out what was at the beginning, it's best to work backwards. Here's a picture of the sweets at the very end. John has four and Olivia has four. Since we're working backwards, we need to focus on second exchange, that is that Olivia gave John as many sweets as he had after the first exchange. In other words, after this exchange, John had twice as many sweets as before. So before it happened, he had half of what he now has. So he has four pieces of candy or sweets now, he had two before. So we're gonna give the two pieces of candy back to Olivia. Now let's look at the first exchange. John gave Olivia as many sweets as Olivia had. This also means that before John gave her these sweets, she had half of what she has at this point. Half of six is three. So we're gonna give the three pieces of candy back to John. We are now in the situation at the beginning and we can see that at the beginning, John had five sweets. So the answer is B, five.

John

Olivia

sweets exchange

backward problem-solving

initial sweets count