Answer:

Let "x" be the number of minutes in the span of time between "now" and 12:00 noon.  Then the span of time between 8:00 AM and "24 minutes ago" is 5x minutes.  This diagram illustrates this:

Point B represents "now", and point "A" represents "24 minutes ago".  Together the three spans of time add up to 240 minutes, so the equation for this problem is

5x + 24 + x = 240

Solve for x to get x=36 minutes.