Each year the Royal London company gives its employees a gift box containing 6 bags of coffee, 4 boxes of tea, and 2 boxes of biscuits. If in the first three years, the number of employees grew from 2 to 12 to 18, what was the total quantity of coffee, tea, & biscuits distributed by the company in those years?
Okay, so I'm assuming that each employee receives their own gift box.
Let's use C to represent coffee, T to represent tea and B to represent biscuits.
Each gift box's contents can therefore be written as 6C + 4T + 2B.
In the first year, the company is providing gift boxes for 2 employees. They are then providing for 12 employees in the second year, and then for 18 in the third.
Since each employee receives their own gift box, this would mean that the company needs 2 for the first year, 12 for the second, and 18 for the third.
To get the total number over the three years, we would add these three numbers.
2 + 12 + 18 = 32
So, 32 gift boxes are distributed in total.
As each gift box's contents can be represented as 6C + 4T + 2B, we'd multiply this by 32, for the total number of gift boxes over the three years.
32(6C + 4T + 2B)
= 192C + 128T + 64B
So, the total quantity of each item comes out to 192 bags of coffee, 128 boxes of tea, and 64 boxes of biscuits.
Hope this helped :)