Associate Level Material

Appendix F Ticket Sales

Living in or near a metropolitan area has some advantages. Entertainment opportunities are almost endless in a major city. Events occur almost every night, from sporting events to the symphony. Tickets to these events are not available long and can often be modeled by quadratic equations.

Application Practice
Answer the following questions. Use Equation Editor to write mathematical expressions and equations. First, save this file to your hard drive by selecting Save As from the File menu. Click the white space below each question to maintain proper formatting. 1. Suppose you are an event coordinator for a large performance theater. One of the hottest new Broadway musicals has started to tour and your city is the first stop on the tour. You need to supply information about projected ticket sales to the box office manager. The box office manager uses this information to anticipate staffing needs until the tickets sell out. You provide the manager with a quadratic equation that models the expected number of ticket sales for each day x. ( x = 1 is the day tickets go on sale).

Tickets = -0.2x 2 + 12x + 11 a. Does the graph of this equation open up or down? How did you determine this?
The graph starts down; I determined this by looking at the coefficient of the highest power and determined that it was negative.

b. Describe what happens to the tickets sales as time passes.

There is a rise to a peak and then a uniform fall back to zero.

c. Use the quadratic equation to determine the last day that tickets will be sold.
Note. Write your answer in terms of the number of days after ticket sales begin. The last day that tickets will be sold is 61st day after the first ticket sales began. The actual number is 60.9 but I rounded up.

d. Will tickets peak or be at a low during the middle of the sale? How do you know?
The tickets will be at a peak in the middle of the sale because that is when the peak of the parabola occurs.

e. After how many days will the peak or low occur?

x = -b/2a x = -12/(2*-0.2) x = 30 30 days after the initial sale starts the peak will occur.

MAT/117

f. How many tickets will be sold on the day when the peak or low occurs?
If one substitutes in 30 in the equation the answer is 191, so 191 tickets will be sold on the day when the peak occurs.

g. What is the point of the vertex? How does this number relate to your answers in parts e. and f?
The vertex will be (30,191). This relates to my answers in e and f because e gave me the x coordinate, and f gave me the y co-ordinate.

h. How many solutions are there to the equation 0.2 x 2 + 12 x + 11 = 0 ? How do you know?
If one checks b-4ac = 12 - 4*-2*11 > 0; so the equation can have two real number solutions.

i. What do the solutions represent? Is there a solution that does not make sense? If so, in what
ways does the solution not make sense? The solutions represent when sales are at zero. Any solution that is negative does not make sense because it is before the sale has taken place so no tickets can take place.

MAT/117