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Paul has a sum of $260 in $5 and $10 bills. If he has 40 bills in total, how many were of each denomination?

User Tsundoku
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1 Answer

6 votes

Answer:

28 5 dollar bills

12 10 dollar bills

Explanation:

You can write two equations to model this situation'

x will be the number of 5 dollar bills

y will be the number of 10 dollar bills

x+y=40

5x+10y=260

There are a couple of ways you can solve this but but I will be doing it through substitution because that looks easier (I can explain other methods if you're interested)

So we have x+y=40

If I subtract y from both sides and divide by -1 we get

-x+40=y

We can then plug this value in for y in the second equation

5x+10(-x+40)=260

Distribute the 10 and combine like terms to get

-5x+400=260

subtract 400 from both sides and divide by -5 to get

x=28

This means that there are 28 5 dollar bills. We can plug this value back in for x into our first equation to solve for y

28+y=40

Subtract 28 from both sides

y=12

This means that there were a total of 28 5 dollar bills and 12 10s

I doubled checked this in desmos and it checks out

User Cameron Lee
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