Jessica and Josh are selling Entertainment Books to raise money for the art room at their school. Jessica received the prize for selling the most books in the school. Jessica sold 15 times more books than Josh. Together they sold 256 books. How many did each one of them sell?

Assign a corresponding variable to Jessica and Josh. In this problem let’s assign x to Jessica then y to Josh. It says that Jessica sold 15 times more. The first working equation would be x = 15y. Since the two of them had total sales of 256 books, the second working equation is x + y = 256. Substituting the first equation on second equation, the answer would be Jessica sold 240 books while Josh sold 16 books.