ALGEBRA ONE WORD PROBLEM

Question

Sarah took the advertising department from her on a round trip to meet with a potential client. Including Sarah, 10 people took the trip. She was able to purchase coach tickets for $140 and first class tickets for $1210. She used her total budget for airfare for the trip, which was $4610. How many first class tickets did she buy? How many coach tickets did she buy?

Answer 1

Hi Sarah, 

For this problem, you'll be doing a system of equations.

 

Let a=the number of coach tickets 

let b=the number of first class tickets

 

Here are your two equations:

 

a+b=10    (10 people took the trip)

104a+1210b=4610    (amount of money spent)

 

For the first equation, you can get a by itself: 

a=10-b  (subtract b from both sides)

 

Now, you can plug that into the second equation:

104a+1210b=4610

140(10-b)+1210b=4610

1400-140b+1210b=4610

1070b=3210

b=3

 

Remember that we let b=the number of first class tickets

Now, we can plug this back into the first equation, and we find that Sarah purchased 7 coach tickets and 3 first class tickets.