If Hank has 48 *fish in his aquarium, and he has 11 times as many *tetras as he has guppies, all we need to do to find out how many of each type he has is perform a system of trial-and-error equations until the problem is solved.
For the first try, let's say that Hank had 3 guppies. If Hank had 11 times as many tetras as he had guppies, then we just multiply 11 by 3.
11 * 3 = 33
Then, we just add the amount of tetras to the amount of guppies.
33 + 3 = 36
36 is less than 48, so Hank had more guppies than 3.
Let's try 5.
5 * 11 = 55
55 + 5 = 60
60 is greater than 48, which means that Hank has less than 5 guppies.
Now let's go between the two numbers that we already tried, to 4...
4 * 11 = 44
44 + 4 = 48
And here we have the answer!
If Hank had 48 fish, with 11 times as many tetras as he had guppies, then that means that Hank had 4 tetras and 44 guppies.
Hope that helped =)
