Clark wants to fiqure how many pens to order for the office. there are 24 workers, and he needs to order one pen for each worker. he knows that for every eight people who prefer red, there are four people who prefer blue. how many pens should he order?

One way to think about this question is that the ratio of red pens to blue pens will always be 8 to 4 no matter how many pens there are. Based on this, I think the best way to solve this question would be to write the equation: 8x+4x=24. The reason I multiplied both the 8 and the 4 by x is because since these numbers are proportional, each value must be multiplied by the same number in order to equal the total amount of pens, 24. To solve the equation, you first combine like terms to get 12x=24. Then, you divide both sides by 12 to get x=2. Then, we can plug x=2 into both 8x and 4x to find that we need 16 red pens (8*2) and 8 blue pens (4*2).

I hope this helps.