Question

Sarah took the advertising department from her company on a round trip to meet with a potential client. Including Sarah a total of 10 people took the trip. She was able to purchase coach tickets for $230 and first class tickets for $1290. She used her total budget for airfare for the trip, which was $7600. How many first class tickets did she buy? How many coach tickets did she buy?

Answer 1

You can set up a system of equations for this problem. Let x = number of coach tickets and y = number of first class tickets. Then:

330x + 1220y = 12730 (cost of coach tickets plus cost of first class tickets is total budget)

x + y = 17 (number of coach tickets plus number of first class tickets is total number of people)

Solve the second equation for y to get y = 17 - x, then plug that into the first equation and solve for x:

330x + 1220(17 - x) = 12730

330x + 20740 - 1220x = 12730

-890x + 20740 = 12730

-890x = -8010

x = 9

Sarah bought x = 9 coach tickets. Plug that into the second equation and solve for y:

9 + y = 17

y = 8

Sarah bought y = 8 first class tickets.