The cost of 12 oranges and 7 apples is $5.36. Eight oranges and 5 apples cost $3.68. How do you find the cost of each?

Question

8057 views around the world

You can reuse this answer
Creative Commons License

Answer 1 · 2017-01-18T22:54:42

I found:
Oranges: $$0.26$
Apples: $$0.32$

Let us call the cost of oranges $Or$ and apples $Ap$ . We can write:

$12Or +7Ap=5.36$
and
$8Or +5Ap=3.68$

we can extract from the first:

$Or=(5.36-7Ap)/12$

we substitute this into the second equation for $Or$ :

$cancel(8)^2*(5.36-7Ap)/cancel(12)^3+5Ap=3.68$

solve for $Ap$ :

$10.72-14Ap+15Ap=11.04$

$Ap=0.32$

use this value bach into the first equation:

$Or=(5.36-7Ap)/12=(5.36-7*0.32)/12=0.26$