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Comment by DenisM | Hacker News Reader

[...] A food truck sells salads for $6.50 each and drinks for $2.00 each. The food truck's revenue from selling a total of 209 salads and drinks in one day was $836.50. How many salads were sold that day? [...]

I feel really dumb.

So they sold 209 salads, and then it is asked how many salads were sold. Well, 209, no?

Assuming they meant to ask how many drinks were sold, 209 salads * $6.50 per salad, comes out to over $1300. So about -250 drinks were sold, that is 250 were bough from customers.

Assuming instead they meant that it was 209 drinks that were sold, the number of salads then comes out to (836.50 - 2*209) / 6.50 which is 64.38

What am I missing???

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I think they mean that there were 209 items sold, made up of some number of salads (x) and some number of drinks (y) such that X + Y = 209, and that $6.50X + $2.00Y = $836.50

The question is horribly worded, but I hope that helps clear some ambiguity. It's a system of equations -- 2 equations, 2 unknowns, which makes it a slightly harder problem.

> The food truck's revenue from selling a total of 209 salads and drinks in one day was $836.50.

The key word is total which means it is 209 things, of which some are drinks and some are salads.

It's an 'isolate a variable and solve' thing.

- s + d = 209

- 2d + 6.5s = 836.50

- Solve for 's'

Man, I miss math.

# salads sold + # drinks sold = 209, perhaps?

I see. Yeah. I would have totally failed this test.

That's definitely it. They want you to solve a system of equations after understanding a word problem

Given

s + d = 209

6.5 * s + 2 * d = 836.5

solve for s

I believe it should be interpreted as this: 209 items were sold of which some were salads and some were drinks.

209 is the total sold, drinks AND salads.

836.50 = 6.5 * x + 2 * (209 - x)

Find x

That looks like it could have come right out of a math book; and having it structured in such a manner makes the difficulty of the problem much lower for any one with some English reading comprehension problems. In fact its so simply stated that Wolfram Alpha has no problem with solving for x.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=836.50+%3D+6.5+*+x+%2B...

Wolfram Alpha is awesome as long as you know how to properly define the question, and when it comes to "word" problems that is 90% of the work. So this new version of the SAT just makes me think they want to make it more challenging for people who have reading comprehension problems. And the test being in English doesn't do one bit to help with that; case in point all of the discussion here about how the questions could be interpreted.

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