Question

On 'bring your pet to school day,' 14 classmates brought in birds and dogs. When added together, the pets had 36 legs. How many pets were dogs, and how many were birds?

Answer 1

Using a system of equations, we determined there are 4 dogs and 10 birds among the 14 pets brought to school.

Step-by-step explanation:

To solve the problem on 'Bring Your Pet to School Day', where 14 classmates brought in birds and dogs, and all pets had a total of 36 legs, we set up a system of equations using two variables to represent the number of dogs (D) and the number of birds (B).

• Each dog has 4 legs and each bird has 2 legs.
• There are 14 pets in total, so D + B = 14.
• To represent the total number of legs, 4D (legs from dogs) + 2B (legs from birds) = 36.

We can solve these equations simultaneously. From the first equation, we can express D in terms of B: D = 14 - B. Substituting this into the second equation to solve for B gives us 4(14 - B) + 2B = 36. Simplifying, we get 56 - 4B + 2B = 36 which implies 56 - 36 = 2B which yields 20 = 2B, and therefore B = 10 birds.

Using D = 14 - B, we substitute B = 10 to find D: D = 14 - 10 which gives us D = 4 dogs.

There are 4 dogs and 10 birds.