Jennifer is saving money to buy a bike. The bike costs $245. She has $125 saved, and each week she adds $15 to her savings. How long will it take her to save enough money to buy the bike.

Answer 1

This is an excellent story problem to make an equation for! First, identify what you're trying to solve for and assign it a variable. We want to know the time (in weeks) it will take her to raise enough money for a new bike. Let's use "w" as the variable for weeks.

Now, each week (w) she earns $15. So, we can multiply the number of weeks by 15 to see how much she has made in that number of weeks:

$15w

She has already saved $125 so we can add that to the $15w she is earning now:

$15w + $125

Now we need our new expression to equal the amount of money she needs to buy the new bike ($245):

$15w + $125 = $245

Now just solve it:

15w + 125 = 245

-125 -125

15w = 120

/15 /15

w = 8

This tells us it will take her 8 weeks to earn enough money to buy the new bike. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out!

Answer 2

w=number of weeks

245=125+15w

Steps:

1. Subtract 125 from both sides.
2. Divide both sides by 15

That should leave you with 'w' or the number of weeks it'll take.

Answer 3

If Jennifer currently has $125 and the bike costs $245, she only needs to save $120 more dollars. We figure out how much more she needs to save by subtracting the total currently saved ($125) from the total needed ($245).

So now that we know what more is needed, we try to figure out how long it will take her to save up the additional dollars. There are multiple ways to do this, but the easiest would be to divide the total still needed ($120) by the amount that she is saving each week ($15). So our equation would be

$120 / $15

When we do the division out, we get 8. This means that if she saves $15 per week, it will take her 8 weeks to save $120. 8 weeks is the answer to the question asked.

To check ourselves, we can simply multiply 8 by $15, and the answer will come out to $120. To further check ourselves, if we add $120 to the original total of $125, we should arrive at $245, which is the total that is needed for the bike purchase.