Question

There are 15 animals in a barn. These animals are horses and chickens. There are 44 legs in all. Write a system of equations to determine how many horses and chickens are in the barn.

Answer 1

Answer:

x=8, y=7

Step-by-step explanation:

Lets keep x as the number of chickens and y as the number of horses.

Since each horse has 4 legs and each chicken has 2 legs we get our first equation to be

2x+4y=44

This is because we need to multiply the number of chickens times 2 to get the number of chicken legs, and same for the horses except 4 because they have 4 legs.

the second equation is

x+y=15

next we can use the substitution method to solve.

First we solve for x

x+y=15

x=15-y

We can substitute this into the first equation

2x+4y=44

2(15-y)+4y=44

30-2y+4y=44

30+2y=44

2y=14

y=7

Now we can substitute this into the original equation, x+y=15 and get the equation x+7=15, x=8

The final answer is x=8, y=7