Question

Three friends spent 42 hours painting a neighbor’s house. John painted 1/3 of the time, Lenny worked 3/7 of the time, and Abby painted the rest of the time. how many hours did each friend paint? What would happen If another friend joined them, and they divided the work up evenly among them, how much more, or less, would John, Lenny and Abby each have painted?

Answer 1

John painted for 14 hours, Lenny for 18, and Abby for 10. If another friend joined and they split the hours equally, they each would have to work for 10 1/2 hours. John would paint 3 1/2 fewer hours, Lenny would have painted 7 1/2 fewer hours, and Abby would paint 1/2 hours more.

Answer 2

We are told to first find the number of hours each friend worked. The question gives us that they all worked a total of 42 hours and that John worked 1/3 of the time, Lenny worked 3/7 of the time, and finally that Abby worked the rest of the time. Let's first find how long John worked. We can do this by multiply 42 by 1/3, which gives us 14. Therefore, John worked 14 hours. Now, we can find how long Lenny worked, and we can do this by multiplying 42 by 3/7, giving us 18 hours.  Hence, John and Lenny worked a total of 32 hours. That leaves 10 hours, meaning that Abby worked a total of 10 hours. The answer to the first question is that John worked 14 hours, Lenny worked 18 hours, and Abby worked 10 hours.

Now, we can move on to the second question. The second question says that another friend joined them, making 4 people total. We are given that all four people split up the work evenly, so that means we have to divide 42 by 4, giving us 10.5 hours each. The question is asking us how much more or less Abby, Lenny, and John worked when the new friend cam in. So, to find this, we need to just subtract the number of hours each of them worked, which is our answer.
John: 
14 - 10.5 = 3.5 less hours (we are subtracting from the original)
Lenny:
18 - 10.5 = 7.5 less hours (we are subtracting from the original work amount)
Abby:
10.5 - 10 = 0.5 more hours (we are subtracting from the new work amount)

Therefore, John worked 3.5 hours less than he worked before, Lenny worked 7.5 hours less than he worked before, and Abby worked 0.5 hours more than she worked when there were only three people. Hope this helped and have a phenomenal day!