Aloysius had some money at first. He spent $360 on a suit. He then spent 1/7 of his remaining money on shoes and had 2/5 of his money left. How much money did he have at first?
For this problem, you would have to set the amount of money as a variable.
They key is to essentially write a solvable equation to figure it out!
In fact, my parents used to give me a lot of problems similar to this one :)
So let's let that be x.
From the problem, we can get the equation 25x+17(x−360)+360=x.
We have 25x+17x−3607+360=x. Combining like terms and isolating x, we have 21607=1635x.
We multiply both sides by 35/16, and we have 3516⋅21607=x.
So we have x=675
$675!
Thanks!