Question

sarah owes 22.40 for her text messaging in the month of march. If her texting message plan costs 14 dollars for the first 250 messages and .5 cent for each additional messages how many text messages did she send that month?

Answer 1

0.5 times 16 equals 8 so that’s 276 messages 0.5 to get 40 cents is 8 more so 276 messages in all I hope I did this right

Answer 2

The answer is 267.

If we wanted to represent this scenario as an equation, it would be 22.40-14+.5x (x being the amount of texts after 250). We are using PEMDAS, but because the variable is unknown, we skip multiplication and just go left to right. 22.40 - 14 = 8.40. With 8.40, we now know how much it costed AFTER 250 messages (how much she owes after $14). If we want to find how many PER 50 cents, we have to DIVIDE (reverse of multiplication). 8.4 / .5 = 16.80. Because you can't send .8 of a text message, you round to get 17. 250 + 17 = 267 (messages sent that month).