Question

Under her cell phone plan, Caroline pays a flat cost of $54.50 per month and $5 per gigabyte. She wants to keep her bill at $74 per month. Write and solve an equation which can be used to determine gg, the number of gigabytes of data Caroline can use while staying within her budget.

Answer 1

5 gg

Explanation:

Let us treat the number of gigabytes of data she can use (at max) per month as x.

We can say that
`54.5 + 5x = 74` will always be deducted from her and $5x per month for the extra data she uses.

`54.5 + 5x = 74`

⇒
`5x = 74 - 54.5`

⇒
`5x = 25.5`

⇒
`x = 25.5 / 5`

⇒
`x = 5.1`

As she can only buy a fixed number of data, which cannot be a decimal, let us take the number directly below 5.1 - which is 5 - as the answer.

Caroline can use up to 5gg of data