phone plan costs Eric $35 for a month. he sent 450 text messages. If he was charged an fixed fee of $12.50, how much di

Question

I am confused on how to set up and solve the equation for this problem

Answer 1

I'm gonna take a guess and say that the $35 was the total bill and he has a fixed rate of $12.50 per month.

35 - 12.50 = 22.50

If he is being charged per text message and he sent 450 text messages, then the 22.50 would be the cost of his 450 text messages, which would make each text message cost 5 cents.

Here's how we set it up:

We performed subtraction and multiplication in our basic math approach to this word problem, so to set up the algebraic equation, we will be using the opposite approach.

We want to find out how much each text message costs, so that is our unknown value or our variable, so let's let t = the cost of each text.

$12.50 + 450t = $35

This is saying that the flat $12.50 per month plus the number of text messages times the cost per text message equals the total monthly bill of $35.

You then perform the operations we performed in the basic math in order to solve for t.

You would subtract 12.50 from both sides and then you have 450t = 22.50, so you will divide both sides by 450. You get an answer of 5 cents per text message. Your work should look like this:

12.50 + 450t = 35

-12.50 - 12.50

450t = 22.50

—— ———

450 450

t = 0.05 or 5 cents