Paul owes Paula 35 cents and has a pocket full of 5-cent coins, 10-cent coins, and 25-cent coins that he can use to pay her. What is the difference between the largest and the smallest number of coins he can use to pay her?

Sagot :

Least coins solution:

To get the least number of coins to get 35 cents, we use the highest quantity possible of the highest available value, in this case it is 25 cents and we can only have 1. The remaining value would be 10 cents so we take the next highest value which is 10 cents and we have 1 of it.

So 35 cents = 1 (25 cents) + 1 (10 cents)

We would have 2 coins for the least number.

Largest possible number of coins solution:

We do the opposite. We get the largest possible quantity of the smallest value available, in this case which is 5 cents, and we can have 7 of it.

The largest number of coins possible is 7.

Final Answer:
So we get the difference which is 7 -  2 or 5.