Two thirds of the musicians in a 16-piece band are girls. the 16 musicians include 12 brass players. what fraction of the band plays brass instrument?

since 3 does not divide 16, how can 2/3 of the 16 players be girls?

12/16 are brass

Steve,

Thank you. THat is part of the question that is not needed to solve the problem.

I mean the 2/3 of the musicians are girls.

I know. Maybe one of the band members is not a musician, eh? Probably the drummer. :-)

:) lol.

Thanks again

To find the fraction of the band that plays a brass instrument, we need to determine how many musicians in the band play brass instruments and divide it by the total number of musicians.

Given that two-thirds of the musicians in the 16-piece band are girls, we can find that two-thirds of 16 is 16 * (2/3) = 32/3 = 10.67. Since we cannot have a fraction of a musician, we know that 10 musicians must be girls.

Therefore, the remaining 6 musicians are boys. Since we know that there are 12 brass players in total, we can subtract the number of girls (10) from the total number of brass players (12) to find the number of boys playing brass instruments: 12 - 10 = 2.

So, there are 2 boys and 10 girls playing brass instruments, making a total of 12 musicians who play brass instruments out of the total 16 musicians in the band.

The fraction of the band that plays brass instruments is 12/16.

Simplifying this fraction, we can divide both the numerator and denominator by the greatest common divisor, which is 4, to give us 3/4.

Therefore, three-fourths (3/4) of the 16-piece band plays a brass instrument.