Kelly has four dimes and some nickels. The total value of her clients is $2.25. Right in equation for this

Question

Kelly has four dimes and some nickels. The total value of a coin is $2.25. Write an equation for this.

Answer 1

Hi Elisa,

This is an interesting question. I'm going to show how you could solve it using pre-algebra. So that I don't give away the exact answer, I'm going to change your question slightly. Let's take a look at the following:

Elisa has five dimes and some nickels. The total value of the coins is $1.00. Write an equation for this.

A good clue here is, "The total value of the coins is $1.00." That means we can start writing the equation like this:

1.00 =

Then, we can add the other part that we know, "Elisa has five dimes."

1.00 = 0.10 × 5

(I've shown the value of a dime multiplied by five.)

Now to figure out how to represent the nickels. Since we don't know how many of them there are, we can use the variable n for nickel. We do know that whatever the number of nickels we have, we will multiply them by their value, $0.05. So the final equation looks like:

1.00 = 0.10 × 5 + 0.05n

I've written the numbers the way I have to help you think about the way we typically show currency. However, it would also be mathematically correct to write the equation this way:

1 = 0.10 × 5 + 0.05n or 1 = 0.5 + 0.05n