A food packing company makes a popular fruit cocktail. To ensure a good mixture of fruit, there are 3 cherry halves for every 8 white grapes in a jar. An inspector notices that one jar has 12 cherry halves and 20 white grapes. What can be done to fix the error?

The correct answer is to add 12 more white grapes to the mixture.

Step-by-step explanation:

To begin with, the error in the mixture is due to the fact that there are 20 white grapes with 12 cherry halves stating that the mixture will not be good enough because the number of white grapes is not higher enough according to the rule that there must be 8 white grapes for every 3 cherry halves.

Secondly, to understand that rule, the person must divide the 12 cherry halves by 3, obtaining 4. That is the number that the person must multiplies the 8 white grapes to obtain a number that will balance the mixture according to the rule. Then if the person multiplies 8 by 4 he will obtain 32 and despiting the fact that the mixture already has 20 white grapes then it will only need to add 12 more to get the to number in which the mixture will be balanced.

You want 3/8 to equal 12/20. You can multiply the 3 by 4. That gets you 12 cherry halves. In order to keep the fractions the same you must also multiply the 8 by 4. Now you have. 12/32

32-20 = 12. So you have to add you need to add 12 white grapes