Dishes Puzzle

To solve this puzzle, I first drew a picture to visually see how the different dishes would be shared over a group of people. From the drawing, I could see that, with four people, they could split rice and meat evenly but not broth. In order to find the minimum number of people that could split rice, broth, and meat with whole numbers of dishes, I looked at the lowest common multiple of 2, 3, and 4, which is 12. (Since 2 divides 4, the LCM is just dependent on 3 and 4 - which have no common factors so the solution is 3*4=12).

To find out how many dishes of each I would need for 12 people, I used ratios (see above).
6+4+3=13, so for every 12 people we would have 13 dishes in total (13 dishes/12 people). To find out how many people use up 65 dishes, I divided 65 by 13 to find that I would need 5 groups. Therefore, I got the equivalent ratios 13 dishes/12 ppl = 65 dishes/60 ppl (12*5=60). So there were 60 guests that used 65 dishes!

I don't think the cultural context has much effect of the problem for me. I can still understand it and solve it without understanding the culture behind the puzzle. I think it is interesting that I know similar problems to this one from my high school days, so people from around the world have been solving this problem for such a long time!