3sisters are each 2 years apart in age. the youngest sister is emily the middle sister samantha and the older sister is lauren together their combined ages are 42. how old is each sister?

Emily is 12, Samantha is 14, and Lauren is 16. Basically all you do to solve this problem is add numbers that are two apart until you find something. 

Ex. 2+4+6=12  4+6+8=18 so on and so forth. 

Since each sister is 2 years apart, the middle sister is the average age. If we take 42 and divide it by 3, we get the middle(Samantha's) age.  If Smantha is 14, we add 2 to get Lauren's age...16 and we subtract 2 to get Emily's age...12.

so we have...12, 14, 16 = 42

The first one is correct