At a local play, student tickets cost $5 each and adult tickets cost $10 each. If ticket sales were $3,000 for 500 tickets, how many students attended the play?

Answer 1

Let's use S to represent the number of student tickets sold and A to represent the number of adult tickets sold.

We know that the total number of tickets sold was 500, so:

S + A = 500

We also know that student tickets cost $5 and adult tickets cost $10, and that total ticket sales were $3,000, so:

5S + 10A = 3000

Now we have two equations with two unknowns that we can solve simultaneously. Let's start by solving the first equation for A:

A = 500 - S

Now we can substitute this expression for A into the second equation and simplify:

5S + 10(500 - S) = 3000

5S + 5000 - 10S = 3000

-5S = -2000

S = 400

So 400 student tickets were sold.