The only garments that a particular factory produces are  dresses and shirts. It produces three	dresses for every five shirts  it makes. If the factory produced a total of 72 garments today,  how many dresses did it make?
I know that the ratio of dresses to shirts is 3:5, which means that out of every 8 garments, 3 are dresses and 5 are shirts. So I can divide 72 by 8 to find out how many groups of 8 garments there are. 72 divided by 8 is 9, so there are 9 groups of 8 garments. In each group, 3 are dresses, so I can multiply 3 by 9 to find out how many dresses there are in total. 3 times 9 is 27, so the factory made 27 dresses today. 