Question

One day, a person went to a horse racing area. Instead of counting the number of humans an horses, he conuted 74 heads and 196 legs. How many humans and horses were there?

Answer 1

You have two unknowns - the number of people (P) and the number of horses (H). You can set up two equations to solve for these two unknowns. Every person and every horse has 1 head, so:

$P+H=74$

Also, every person has 2 legs but every horse has 4 legs, so:

$2P+4H=196$

We can now solve by rearranging the first equation (H = 74 - P), and subbing that value into the second equation: