"Age" Word Problems

In January of the year 2000, I was one more than eleven times as old as my son William. In January of 2009, I was seven more than three times as old as him. How old was my son in January of 2000? Obviously, in "real life" you'd have walked up to my kid and and asked him how old he was, and he'd have proudly held up three grubby fingers, but that won't help you on your homework. Here's how you'd figure out his age for class: First, name things and translate the English into math: Let "E " stand for my age in 2000, and let "W " stand for William's age. Then E = 11W + 1 in the year 2000 (from "eleven times as much, plus another one"). In the year 2009 (nine years after the year 2000), William and I will each be nine years older, so our ages will be E + 9 and W + 9. Also, I was seven more than three times as old as William was, so E + 9 = 3(W + 9) + 7 = 3W + 27 + 7 = 3W + 34. This gives you two equations, each having two variables:

E = 11W + 1 E + 9 = 3W + 34
If you know how to solve systems of equations, you can proceed with those techniques. Otherwise, you can use the first equation to simplify the second: since E = 11W + 1, plug "11W + 1 " in for "E " in the second equation:

E + 9 = 3W + 34 (11W + 1) + 9 = 3W + 34 11W 3W = 34 9 1 8W = 24 W=3 Solving Age Problems One of the most popular applications of linear equations is solving age problems. In this hub I present three word problems of this sort with their complete solution. Hope you will enjoy this hub. Problem Number One : A mothers age is five years greater than twice her sons age as of the present. Fifteen years sgo the mothers age was six times her sons age. What are the present ages of the mother and the son ? Solution : Representation: Their present ages: Let X = Sons age 2X + 5 = Mothers age Their ages 15 years ago: X 15 = Sons age 2X + 5 -15 = 2X -10 = Mothers age Working Equation : 2X 10 = 6( X 15 ) 2X - 10 = 6X 90 90 10 = 6X 2X 80 = 4X 80/4 = 4X/4 20 = X X = 20 2X + 5 = 2(20) + 5 = 45 The mother is 45 years old and the son is 20 years old as of the present.

"Mixture" Word Problems

Mixture problems involve creating a mixture from two or more things, and then determining some quantity (percentage, price, etc) of the resulting mixture. Your school is holding a "family friendly" event this weekend. Students have been pre-selling tickets to the event; adult tickets are $5.00, and child tickets (for kids six years old and under) are $2.50. From past experience, you expect about 13,000 people to attend the event. But this is the first year in which tickets prices have been reduced for the younger children, so you really don't know how many child tickets and how many adult tickets you can expect to sell. Your boss wants you to estimate the expected ticket revenue. You decide to use the information from the pre-sold tickets to estimate the ratio of adults to children, and figure the expected revenue from this information. You consult with your student ticket-sellers, and discover that they have not been keeping track of how many child tickets they have sold. The tickets are identical, until the ticket-seller punches a hole in the ticket, indicating that it is a child ticket. But they don't remember how many holes they've punched. They only know that they've sold 548 tickets for $2460. How much revenue from each of child and adult tickets can you expect? To solve this, we need to figure out the ratio of tickets that have already been sold. If we work methodically, we can find the answer. Let A stand for the number of adult tickets pre-sold, and C stand for the child tickets pre-sold. Then A + C = 548. Also, since each adult ticket cost $5.00, then ($5.00)A stands for the revenue brought in from the adult tickets pre-sold; likewise, ($2.50)C stands for the revenue brought in from the child tickets. Then the total income so far is given by ($5.00)A + ($2.50)C = $2460. But we can only solve an equation with one variable, not two. So look again at that first equation. If A + C = 548, then A = 548 C (or C = 548 A; it doesn't matter which variable you solve for). Organizing this information in a grid, we get: tickets sold $/ticket total $ adult child

total From the last column, we get (total $ from the adult tickets) plus (total $ from the child tickets) is (the total $ so far), or, as an equation:

548 C C 548

$5 $2.50 ---

$5(548 C) $2.50C $2460

($5.00)(548 C) + ($2.50)C = $2460 $2740 ($5.00)C + ($2.50)C = $2460 $2740 ($2.50)C = $2460 ($2.50)C = $280 C = $280/$2.50 = 112 Then 112 child tickets were pre-sold, so A = 548 112 = 436 adult tickets were sold. (Using "A" and "C" for our variables, instead of "x" and "y", was helpful, because the variables suggested what they stood for. We knew instantly that "C = 112" meant "112 child tickets". This is a useful technique.) Now we need to figure out how many adult and child tickets we can expect to sell overall. Since 436 out 436 of 548 pre-sold tickets were adult tickets, then we can expect /548, or about 79.6%, of the total tickets sold to be adult tickets. Since we expect about 13,000 people, this works out to about 10,343 adult tickets. (You can find this value by using proportions, by the way.) The remaining 2657 tickets will be child tickets. Then the expected total ticket revenue totals to $58,357.50, of which ($5.00)(10,343) = $51,715 will come from adult tickets, and ($2.50)(2,657) = $6,642.50 will come from child tickets.