At a garden shop, a customer pays $48 for 5 geraniums and 4 lilies. Another customer pays $58 for 4 geraniums and 6 lilies. How do you a system of equations you can use to find the cost x, of one geranium and the cost y, of one lily?

Question

2944 views around the world

You can reuse this answer
Creative Commons License

Answer 1 · 2017-07-01T14:49:33

A lily costs $7 and a geranium $4.

From the question we can write two equations. let the number of lilies be l and the number of geraniums be g, then:

$5g+4l=48$
$4g+6l=58$

Multiply the first equation by 4 and the second by 5, the number of lilies in the other, gives:

$20g+16l=192$
$20g+30l=290$

Subtract the first equation from the second gives:

$14l=98$ which dividing by 14 gives $l=7$

Substituting the value $l=7$ in the first equation gives:

$5g+28=48$

Subtract 20 from both side gives:

$5g=20$ divide by 5 gives $g=4$

So, a lily costs $7 and a geranium costs $4.