Question

A writing workshop enrolls novelists and poets in a ratio of 5 to 3. There are 24 people at the workshop. How many novelists are there? How many poets are there?

Answer 1

A key part to understanding ratios is that it isn't part over whole. Ratios say that there are 5 novelists PER 3 poets.
This can be rephrased to say that there are 5 novelists per 8 TOTAL people.

From here, we can use fractions: `5/8 = x/24` where x is the number of novelists

Multiplying the left side by `3/3` yields `15/24`

Therefore, there are 15 novelists at the workshop.

We can use the same method for the poets : `3/8 = y/24`

= `9/24`

To check, we can add up these two values and they should sum to the total number of people in the workshop : 24.

15 novelists + 9 poets = 24 ? TRUE
so we are done.