Hello my name is bob

Question

The coach of the field hockey team can spend at most 475$ on new team uniforms.The coach will order the uniforms online and pay a mailing cost of $6.50.If each uniform costs 29$,how many uniforms can the coach order?

Answer 1

In order to do this question, you have to realize that the shipping cost is constant i.e it doesn't depend on the amount of uniforms the coach buys. He will always pay the same shipping regardless so you think of it in terms of how much money the coach actually has available to spend. I'll do it first in the english, why it makes sense, way and then follow up with how you would make it into an equation.

 

The coach has 475$ but he has to pay for shipping no matter what so let's just remove that from the total from the start:

475 - 6.50 = 468.5

 

Now how many uniforms can he purchase with that amount? Well that seems like a perfect time to use division:

 

468.5/29 = 16.15 uniforms. Of course you cannot by ~1/6th of a uniform so the coach can order 16 uniforms.

 

Okay so in order to solve this in the "algebraic" way you would think of everything in terms of cost:

 

Let x = the number of uniforms the teacher can buy

 

This tells us that

29*x + 6.5 = 475

 

That is the number of uniforms that the teacher can buy + shipping cost = total cost

 

The steps to solve this equation are EXACTLY like the way we did it above just by thinking about it:

 

Subtract 6.5 from both sides to get the x term alone:

 

29*x = 475 - 6.5

 

Now divide both sides by 29 to get x all by it's lonesome

 

29/29 * x = 468.6/29

Which is exactly what we had before, 16 uniforms.