Question

For her cellular phone service, Vera pays $32 a month plus $0.75 for each minute over the allowed minutes in her plan. Vera received a bill for $47 last month. For how many minutes did she use her phone beyond the allowed minutes?

Answer 1

You start with $32. Plus means you add the cost of the additional minutes.

So you have:

$32 + cost of the additional minutes = the amount of the bill

The cost of the additional minutes is $0.75 multiplied by the number of additional minutes.

We don't know what the number of additional minutes are so we need to assign a variable to represent that number. So let's let m= the number of additional minutes.

So the cost of the additional minutes is $0.75 times m. Which we can write as .75m

So now we have this: Since everything is in units of dollars we can drop the dollar signs.

32 + .75m = the amount of the bill

The amount of the bill is given as $47.

So now we have this as your equation.

32 + .75m = 47

Solving for m we get this:

.75m = 47-32
.75m = 15
m=15/.75
m= 20

So she used an additional 20 minutes.