The energy economy of an area is composed of four industries: gas, coal, hydroelectric, and nuclear. The three main
consumers of energy are area residential consumers, a manufacturing plant, and a university. Assume that each consumer
may use some of the energy produced by each industry, and also that each industry uses some of the energy produced by
each of the other industries. The energy needs of each consumer and industry is represented by a demand vector whose
entries, in order, give the amount of gas, coal, hydroelectric, and nuclear energy needed by each consumer or industry, in
some convenient units. The demand vectors for the consumers are: DR=2 4 0 1 ; DM=3 0 2 5 ; DU=0 3 5 1 ;
and the demand vectors for the industries are: DG=0 1 3 2 ; DC=4 0 1 2 ; DH=3 1 0 1 ; DN=2 1 3 0 . The
price of gas is $15,000 per unit, the price of coal is $10,000 per unit, the price of hydroelectric power is $7000 per unit, and
the price of nuclear energy is $9000 per unit. These prices can be represented by the (column) price vector:
P =
15,000
10,000
7000
9000
Find the income earned by the coal industry and its cost for the other forms of energy it
uses. Then calculate its profit.
Secret messages can be encoded by using a code and an encoding matrix. If we have the code:
a b c d e f g h i j
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
k l m n o p q r s t
11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
u v w x y z space
21 22 23 24 25 26 27 and an encoding matrix E, we can encode a
message by taking every two letters of the message, converting them to their corresponding numbers, creating a 2 × 1
matrix, and then multiplying each two numbers by E. The message may be unscrambled with a decoding matrix which is
the inverse of the coding matrix, E–1. Determine if the given pair of encoding matrices are inverses of each other.