A plumber and her assistant work on a certain installation job. First the assistant does some preparatory work along, and then the plumber completes the job alone. The plumbers gets paid $48 per hour, and the assistant gets paid $28 per hour. If the installation job took a total of 9 hours to complete and the total labor cost for the plumber and assistant was $327, how many hours did each work on the job?


The plumber and assistant together worked 9 hours.

Let the plumber's hours be p, and assistant's hours be a.

p+a=9

the total cost was 327

48p+28a=327

you can put these two equations in the calculator

p+a=9; 48p+28a=327

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