Tablet Time

Student Guide

Quantitative Reasoning
The average American teenager will use the Internet to download music, stream television or videos, read
books, and play games. About 70% of teenagers have their own computers or tablets, and use them
daily. Today, you will investigate tablets and their features, and use equations, charts, and graphs to
solve problems.

As you complete the task, keep these questions in mind:

How can equations be used to represent and solve real-world problems? How are real-world
problems represented by graphs and tables?
In this task, you will apply what you have learned in this unit to answer these questions.

Directions
Complete each of the following tasks, reading the directions carefully as you go. Be sure to show all work
where indicated, including inserting images of graphs. Be sure that all graphs or screenshots include
appropriate information such as titles, labeled axes, etc. If your word processing program has an equation
editor, you can insert your equations here. Otherwise, print this activity sheet and write your answers by
hand.
In addition to the answers you determine, you will be graded based on the work you show, or your
solution process. So, be sure to show all your work and answer each question as you complete the task.
Type all your work into this document so you can submit it to your teacher for a grade. You will be given
partial credit based on the work you show and the completeness and accuracy of your explanations.
Your teacher will give you further directions about how to submit your work. You may be asked to upload
the document, e-mail it to your teacher, or print it and hand in a hard copy.
Now, let’s get started!

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 Student Guide (continued)

Step 1: Use equations to solve problems.

a) Suppose you are able to download 1 free song to your tablet daily and each additional download
costs $0.59. If your monthly bill is $15.34, how many songs did you download if you downloaded
28 free songs? Write an equation and solve for the unknown variable.

The equation is a= 28+(15.34/0.59). Which equals a = 28+26, and 28 + 26= 54. Therefore I
downloaded 54 songs, a = 54.

b) Your uncle Jim lives in England, where the current exchange rate is 1.64 US dollars for each
British pound. Solve for the amount of your monthly bill, to the nearest hundredth, if you lived in
England.

c) If you had an additional 1.65 pounds to download songs, how many more songs could you have
downloaded? Write and solve an equation to solve the problem. Describe the step-by-step
process you used to solve the problem.

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 Student Guide (continued)

Step 2: Find the relationships among variables.

a) The graph below shows the time Andrea spent reading one day. Write a few sentences to
describe the relationship between the time Andrea spent reading and the number of pages she
read.

b) A monthly service fee to download e-books is $4.95, plus $3.99 per book downloaded. Write an
equation that represents the total cost, c, in a month when b books are downloaded. Explain how
your equation represents the problem.

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 Student Guide (continued)

c) Create a graph of your equation from part b.

d) Is your graph discrete or continuous? Explain why you chose this type of graph.

Step 3: Use charts and graphs to solve problems.

a) Your parents will allow you to stream videos on your tablet if you agree to prepay the monthly bill.
If the initial charge to set up an account is $50 and the monthly fee is $18, create a table that
would represent the cost each month for the first year.

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 Student Guide (continued)

b) Suppose you earn $5.50 an hour working at the plant nursery on weekends. Given your table of
values in part a, write an equation to represent how many hours you would have to work to pay
for the first year of video streaming service.

c) Solve the equation you wrote in part b to find how many hours you would have to work to pay for
the first year of video streaming service. Show your work and round your answer to the nearest
tenth.

Sources
Girls looking at a tablet. File: shutterstock_138587282. Licensed from Shutterstock, Digital Image.

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