Since Katie buys x cakes, she is the control. Also, everyone else bought a number of cakes based on Katie's number of cakes. So Katie = x. If Gugu bought 3 tiimes as many as Katie, she bought 3x. If Deanna bought 2 more than Katie, then she bought x + 2. Now if each cake cost .85 and what we don't know is the number of cakes each girl bought, but we do know what the total cost adds up to, our equation would look like this: [tex].85x+3x(.85)+(x+2)(.85)=52.7[/tex]. Simplify that to get .85x + 2.55x + .85x + 1.7 = 52.7. Combining like terms we have 4.25x = 51 and x = 12. That means Katie bought 12 cakes, Gugu bought 36, and Deanna bought 14.
