Question

A summer camp is organizing a hike and needs to buy granola bars for the campers. The granola bars come in small boxes and large boxes. Each small box has 6 granola bars and each large box has 24 granola bars. The camp bought 4 times as many small boxes as large boxes, which altogether had 96 granola bars. Graphically solve a system of equations in order to determine the number of small boxes purchased, x,x, and the number of large boxes purchased, yy.

Answer 1

Let's define the variables:

x = number of small boxes bought.

y = number of large boxes bought.

Then the total number of granola bars is:

x*6 + y*24

We also know that "The camp bought 4 times as many small boxes as large boxes"

Then:

x = 4*y

and "...which altogether had 96 granola bars."

The total number of granola bars is 96, then:

x*6 + y*24 = 96

Then the system of equations is:

x = 4*y

x*6 + y*24 = 96

We want to solve this graphically.

Then we first need to isolate the same variable in both equations.

We can see that in the first one x is already isolated, so let's isolate x in the second equation:

x*6 = 96 - y*24

x = (96 - y*24)/6

x = 16 - y*4

Now we have the equations:

x = 4*y

x = 16 - y*4

To solve this graphically we need to graph both fo these lines and see in which point the lines do intersect.

The point where the lines intersect is the solution of the system.

The graph can be seen below.

We can see that the lines do intersect at the point (2, 8)

This means that the camp bought 2 large boxes and 8 small boxes.