3800 people buy $2 fare tickets. When the fare price raises $0.20, 65 customers are lost. If the company wants to make $10950 what must the fare be?
1 Answer
The problem statement results in a quadratic with two possible solutions:
Explanation:
First, we need to write out a relationship between price and ridership. If we start out with 3800 passengers at $2 a ticket, and there is a decreasing rate that is linearly proportional to the change in price (65 per $0.20 above original price), the equation for ridership looks like this:
Where
Now that we have an equation for the number of riders, we would simply multiply the number of riders by the ticket price to get our answer:
Notice that we now have the makings of a quadratic! Let's rearrange and simplify:
Finally, lets solve using the quadratic equation: