A farmer bought a number of pigs for $189.

Question

A farmer bought a number of pigs for $189. However, 8 of them died before he could sell the rest at a profit of 7 per pig. His total profit was $19. How many pigs did he originally buy?

He originally bought ___ pigs.

Is there a specific plug-in equation?

Answer 1

You will have to construct the equation yourself, here is how:

revenue = revenue (this is a good place to start)

now we know that profit = revenue - expenses so we can rearrange this equation to get revenue = expenses + profit. We can replace the right side of the equation with expenses + profit.

We also know that profit is just the price of the pigs times the number of pigs sold so we can replace the left side of the equation with price * (pigs sold).

Here is what we get:

price * (pigs sold) = expenses + profit

Just need to take into account that some of the pigs died so the pigs sold do not account for all pigs bought so:

price * (pigs bought - pigs died) = expenses + profit)

now plug in numbers:

price = 7

pigs bought is unknown so we can call it x

pigs died = 8

expenses = 189

profit = 19

7*(x-8) = 189+19

7*(x-8) = 208

(x-8) = 208/7

x = 208/7 +8

x = 37.71