Question

A radio station ordered hats and coffee mugs to give away as prizes. A total of 1,000 of these items were ordered, and 3 times as many coffee mugs were ordered as hats. In which equation does h represent the number of hats ordered?​

Answer 1

The options are not shown, so i will answer in a general way.

Let's define the variables:

h = number of hats

m = number of mugs.

We know that a total of 1000 items were ordered, then:

h + m = 1000

We also know that we have 3 times more mugs than hats, this can be written as:

m = 3*h

Now we have the system of equations:

h + m = 1000

m = 3*h

To solve these, we usually start by isolating one of the variables in one equation and then replace that in the other equation, but in this case, we already have m isolated in the second equation, then we can replace that in the first equation to get:

h + m = 1000

h + (3*h) = 1000

Now we can solve this equation for h, and find the number of hats ordered.

4*h = 1000

h = 1000/4 = 250

There were 250 hats ordered.