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Evaluate mentally.
These three figures are called Platonic solids.
Tetrahedron
Cube
Dodecahedron
The table shows the number of vertices, edges, and faces for the tetrahedron and dodecahedron.
| faces | vertices | edges | |
|---|---|---|---|
| tetrahedron | 4 | 4 | 6 | 
| cube | |||
| dodecahedron | 12 | 20 | 30 | 
There are some interesting relationships between the number of faces (), edges (), and vertices () in all Platonic solids. For example, the number of edges is always greater than the number of faces, or . Another example: The number of edges is always less than the sum of the number of faces and the number of vertices, or .
There is a relationship that can be expressed with an equation. Can you find it? If so, write an equation to represent it.
Write an equation to represent each situation.
The tax on the sale of a car in Michigan is 6%. At a dealership in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a car purchase also involves \$120 in miscellaneous charges added after taxes are computed.
There are several quantities in this situation: the original car price, sales tax, miscellaneous charges, and total price. Write an equation to describe the relationship between all the quantities when:
Suppose your class is planning a trip to a museum. The cost of admission is \$7 per person,
and the cost of renting a bus for the day is \$180.
Notice that the numbers of students and teachers can vary. This means that the cost of admission and the total cost of the trip can also vary, because they depend on how many people are going.
Letters are helpful for representing quantities that vary. If represents the number of students who are going, represents the number of teachers, and represents the total cost, we can model the quantities and constraints by writing
Some quantities may be fixed. In this example, the bus rental costs \$180 regardless of how many students and teachers are going (assuming only one bus is needed).
Letters can also be used to represent quantities that are constant. We might do this when we don’t know what the value is, or when we want to understand the relationship between quantities (rather than the specific values).
For instance, if the bus rental is  dollars, we can express the total cost of the trip as . No matter how many teachers or students are going on the trip,
 dollars need to be added to the cost of admission.