Muneebah is the buyer for a large clothing company based in Cape Town, South Africa. She is currently in Ghana buying African fabric shirts, which she will send back to Cape Town. At one factory, she buys x shirts at 3 for 290 Ghanaian Cedi (the Ghana currency), and at the next factory, this one has beautiful shirts, she buys 2x shirts at 5 for 490 Cedi. Write a formula for the total amount she spends on shirts as a function of x. Evaluate your formula if she bought 100 shirts at the first factory. (x and 2x are not the shirt sizes.)
Solution
The shirts at the first factory cost 290/3 Cedi each. Thus she spent 290x/3 Cedi, or 96.67x Cedi at the first factory.
At the second factory the beautiful shirts cost 490/5 Cedi each, so she spent (490/5)2x or 196x Cedi there.
The total she spent was (96.67 + 196)x = 292.67 Cedi. There's the formula.
If she bought 100 shirts at the first factory she spent 29,267 Cedi. (You can go on line to see how many dollars this would be, but the more relevant conversion, since she's from South Africa, would be to see the equivalence between Cedi and South African rand.