Tickets to a basketball game were $2.50 each for students and $4.25 each for adults. if a total of 183 tickets were sold and $538 was collected from the ticket sales, then how many of each type of ticket were sold?

Let's establish our unknown numbers with the variables x and y:

x amount of students
y amount of parents

We can establish these equasions:

x + y = 183 (number of students + number of parents)
2.50x + 4.25y = 538 (the amount each group paid)

To make things easier, we can put x or y from the first equasion on to the right side of that same equasion. I switched x in my case

We insert that into our second equasion and solve it

We now know that x = 137. If the total is 183, we just have to subtract 137 from that number to find out the value of y

RESULT:
x = 137 ==> 137 student tickets sold
y = 46 ==> 46 adult tickets sold