Question

A contractor needs to buy nails to build a house. The nails come in small boxes and large boxes. Each small box has 150 nails and each large box has 450 nails. The contractor bought twice as many large boxes as small boxes, which altogether had 4200 nails. Write a system of equations that could be used to determine the number of small boxes purchased and the number of large boxes purchased. Define the variables that you use to write the system.

Answer 1

Explanation:

Let s represent the number of small boxes and l represent the number of large boxes.

We have 2s = l and 150s + 450l = 4200.

Therefore 150s + 450(2s) = 4200,

150s + 900s = 4200, 1050s = 4200, s = 4.

l = 2s = 2(4) = 8.

Hence there are 4 small boxes and 8 large boxes.