If 2 cooks can prepare 25 meals in 60 minutes, how long would it take 5 cooks?

Here's my take on this one.......this is what I term a "seesaw" problem.

That is...

2 * 60   =  5  * x       divide by 5 on both sides

2 x 12   = 24 miniutes....

This makes sense......because 5 cooks is 2.5 times the help that 2 cooks are, it should take them 1/ 2.5 times as long to do the job

Therefore  60 / 2.5  = 24  minutes

(Note that the number of meals doesn't matter, since the amount of work produced is the same...)

Since you don't know the actual cooking time, (which could be 10 minutes or 50 minutes), you can't answer the question. You don't know how much of the preparation time is saved by having more cooks. If it takes 50 minutes to cook one meal, it may take only 50 minutes to cook 25 meals, depending upon the size of the stove.