Official Solution:

A candy factory manufactures various types of candy: 30% are dark chocolate, 25% are milk chocolate, 20% taffy, 5% caramel, and the rest are cream. Due to a hardware failure, all of the candy are mixed and dispatched into boxes holding 20 individually wrapped pieces of candy each. If 80 boxes are packed before the failure is caught, what is the maximum number of candy pieces a quality control inspector can open to get a taffy candy?

A. 61
B. 120
C. 800
D. 1281
E. 1321


There are total of \(20*80=1,600\) candy pieces in 80 boxes. The worst case scenario would be if the inspector opens only candy which are not taffy. Since there are \(20\%*1,600=320\) taffy then there are \(1,600-320=1,280\) candy pieces, which are not taffy, so the maximum number of candy pieces the inspector needs to open to get a taffy candy is 1,281.


Answer: D
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I agree, I think this question is very confusing.

"what is the maximum number of candy pieces a quality control inspector can open to get a taffy candy?"

I interpreted the question as how many taffy candies are there in the 80 boxes. Since there are 320 taffy candies in the 1600 candies, the inspector can open a maximum of 320 candies to get a taffy candy.