Question

Megan's text messaging plan charges 5 cents for each message over 700 in addition to a $6 base charge. If she owes $8.15 for text messaging in the month of March, how

many text messages did she send that month?

Answer 1

We have the following data:

There is a base charge of $6. This is equivalent to 600 cents

Also, for messages over 700, the charge is 5 cents.

We are told that she owes $8.15. This means she owes 815 cents.

Thus, we can set up the equation

`\begin{gathered} 815=600+5x \\ \text{where x is the number of messages over 700} \end{gathered}`

If we solve for x

`\begin{gathered} 5x=815-600 \\ 5x=215 \\ x=(215)/(5) \\ x=43 \end{gathered}`

The total number of messages for the month of March will be

`700+x`

=

`700+43`

=> 743 messages were sent in the month of March.