Mr. gaines is catering his company picnic. he will pay $18.45 for 3 people to eat barbecue lunch. at this rate, how many people can mr. gaines afford to feed on a budget of $1850.00?

300 people.

Step-by-step explanation:

We can represent this question in the following equation, wherein x represents the cost, per person, and y represents the total amount of people:

3x=18.45

1850/x=y

We can find exactly how much he'd be paying for 1 person by dividing $18.45, the cost for 3 people, by 3, the amount of people.

18.45/3=6.15

Now we know that barbecue lunch costs $6.15 per person. We can plug our x, 6.15, into the second equation.

1850/6.15=300.81300813

Well, we can't exactly have a fraction (.81300813) of a person, so we'll have to make a small correction. We'll round down to the nearest whole number.

y=300

With that, we can conclude that Mr. Gaines can feed 300 people, whose meals cost $6.15 each, and by the end he'll still have $5 to spare!