Answer:
72 pieces of candy
Step-by-step explanation:
As we can see, it was AFTER the 6 boys divided the candy in the bag, each boy had 3 pieces of taffy, 2 jawbreakers, and 7 lemon drops.
In order to solve this, we have to work backwards and press rewind.
First, in order to solve this, let's just keep things simple and combine all of he piece of candy that each boy received: 3 taffies + 2 jawbreakers + 7 lemon drops = 12 pieces of candy that each boy received.
Now that we know each of the 6 boys received a total of 12 pieces of candy, let's press rewind and imagine that they all put them back into the bag.
The first boy puts 12 in the original bag, then the second leaving a total of 24 now, and the third, and so on and so forth.
Once we have the 6th boy put in his share of candy back into the bag, we're left with an original count of 72 pieces of candy.
OR
You can just take the total amount of candy each boy got (12) and multiply it to the number of boys (6) to get 72 pieces of candy.
