John has four more nickels than dimes in his pocket for a total of $1.25. How do you write an equation one could use to determine the number of dimes, d, in his pocket.?

1 Answer
May 1, 2018

n=4+d
n+2d=25

d=7

Explanation:

In this case, you would not write an equation, you would write two equations. This will give you a system with two equations and two unknowns. The equations will be linearly independent, meaning you'll be able to use them to solve for d.

First, we know that John has four more nickels than dimes. Let n be the number of nickels and d the number of dimes. Then n=4+d represents the relative amounts of nickels and dimes.

Additionally, we know that our change totals $1.25. Since dimes are worth 10 cents and nickels worth 5, this can be modeled with the equation 0.05n+0.1d=1.25. To eliminate the decimals, we can multiply this through by 20 to yield n+2d=25.

We then have the two equations:
n=4+d
n+2d=25

We will substitute the first into the second, giving
n+2d=25(4+d)+2d=253d=21d=7.

This gives us our answer; we have 7 dimes. (Plugging this value of d into the first equation also reveals that we have 11 nickels.)