Exercise 2 for section 3.2 (pg.

178)
a.
b. The coefficients 700 and 150 represent the slopes of the heating cost lines
700 represents the rate of change of the total cost in dollars for gas per year since
installation
150 represents the rate of change of the total cost in dollars for solar per year since
installation
c. The constant terms are the initial cost of installing the gas and solar heating in
dollars. The solar heating costs a lot more initially to install than that of gas heating.
d. The coordinates means after about 32 years, the heating costs of gas and solar will
equal to each other, at around $35.000.
e. We set the two equations equal to each other:
Cgas = Csolar  12.000 + 700n = 30.000 + 150n  n = 32,72
 Cgas = Csolar = 34909,09
f. The total cost of solar heating is more expensive than gas up to year 32 and about 7
months. However, after that the total cost of gas heating will be larger than that of
solar heat.