need help to better understand the answers and get to it

Question

Owners of a recreation area are filling a small pond with water. Let y

 represent the total amount of water in the pond (in liters). Let x

 represent the total number of minutes that water has been added. Suppose that x

 and y

 are related by the equation 400+31x=y

Answer 1

If you're familiar with slope-intercept form (y = mx+b), you can write your equation as such:

y = 31x+400

Where 400 is the value of y (amount of water in the pond) when x (time in minutes) is equal to zero. If you remember/have knowledge of this, you will know that 400 is the y-intercept and 31 is the slope. So when no time has passed, there is 400 L of water in the pond, and the total volume of water will increase by 31L per minute.

You can make an x/y table and plug in different values for x to determine the corresponding values for y. Hope this helps!

Answer 2

You don't have a solvable problem right now. The equation can be interpreted as the pond having an initial volume of 400 liters of water; this amount is being increased by water at a rate of 31 liters per minute. Since we don't know the number of minutes the water has been running, we can't calculate an exact numerical value for the total capacity of the pond. And since we don't know the total capacity of the pond, we can't determine how many minutes it will take to fill the pond. This is x = (y-400)/31.

Answer 3

y = 31x + 400

y is the total liters of water in the pond.

x is the amount of minutes that water has been added.

The initial 400 means 400 L is the amount of water the pond started with.

Every minute, 31 L of water is added to the pond.