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Ava has $14. She earns $8 each hour she spent babysitting. She now has $78. Write and solve an equation to find the number of hours Chloe spent babysitting

User Ahaurat
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1 Answer

18 votes
18 votes

Answer:

8 hours.

Explanation:

Hello there! Let's help you with your question here!

To always begin questions, let's start with what we know! So, we know that Ava has a total of $14 and that she earns $8 each hour she spends babysitting and now her new total is $78. Alright! So, what do we have here? Here, we're solving for how much money Ava will earn in total. When being asked to write and solve an equation, we always look for what's known as fixed value and a variable value. And what do this mean?

A fixed value is something that can't really be changed under any circumstances. In the question we have here, we are looking for a number that does not change at all and that would be $14. Why? Because no matter what the new total amount of money being made, she'll always start with $14.

A variable value is something that can be changed based on a quantity. In the question we have here, we are looking for a number that follows up with something that we are unsure of but necessary. In this case, that would be $8 each hour. The reason we use this is because we don't know how many hours Ava's going to work. It can be anything and the total amount of money she earns depends on how many hours she worked.

So, now that we have all of our information, we can start by creating a formula! Let y be the new total amount of money that Ava has and let x be how many hours Ava has spent babysitting. And that would be as such:


y=8x+14

Now that we have our formula, we can now begin to solve. We are looking for how many hours Ava spent babysitting to get her new total value up to $78. We substitute y and then solve for x. It would be as such:


78=8x+14


64=8x - Subtracting 14 from both sides.


8=x - Dividing both sides by 8 to isolate x.

Therefore, in order for Ava to get $78 in total, she would need to spend 8 hours of babysitting, if she started out with $14.

User Tim Ring
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