Answer:
The PTA must sell 42 tickets to make a profit.
Step-by-step explanation:
To solve this problem, we will have to construct an inequality in which $250 is less than our solution.
Let
= student tickets
Since each student ticket is priced at $6.00, the money raised by the student tickets can be represented by the expression:

Since it will cost the PTA $250.00 for the dance, the profit will have to be equal to anything greater than $250.00.
Set up your inequality:

Divide both sides of the inequality by the coefficient of
, which is
:

As you can see, we are left with a decimal, but we will have to round to the nearest whole number as the tickets can only be represented as whole numbers:

Therefore, the PTA must sell 42 tickets in order to make a profit.
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You can check your work by substituting the solved value for the tickets into the inequality:



And since $252 is greater than $250 (represents a $2 profit), our solution is correct.