What was most likely dantes purpose in making many of hell's inhabitants citizens of florence

in the problem you wrote said that the taxi charges $0.070 per mile(which would be 7 cents per mile), but then in your suggested equation you have it as $0.70 per mile (which is 70 cents per mile).

the latter seems more realistic, so i will assume that the taxi costs $5.00 and charges $0.70 per mile with tolls costing an additional $3.50. and it asks you to find how far you can travel on $36.50.

let x the number of miles traveled. since the taxi charges $0.70 per mile, multiplying this by the miles traveled (x) will yield the cost of the taxi ride as far as how far it took you. then adding this amount to the cost of the taxi ($5.00) and the additional cost for the tolls ($3.50) will give you the total cost of the taxi ride ($36.50)

that is,

            (0.70)x + 5.00 + 3.50 = 36.50

adding the like terms on the left-hand side of this equation, we arrive at the following:

            (0.70)x + 8.50 = 36.50

subtracting 8.50 from both sides of the equation, we get:

            (0.70)x = 28.00

to solve for x, divide both sides of the equation above by the coefficient of x (that being, 0.70):

            x = 40

thus, you can travel up to 40 miles on $36.50

quite an interesting way to teach topic sentences, because the answer to this question is the best definition of a topic sentence that one can present, it is as if answering the questions taught you how to do it, this is some real teaching, it is terribly well-done.

the topic sentence in this paragraph is:

topic sentences writers stay on track and keep a paragraph from becoming an aimless collection of sentences about an idea.

which incidentally tells you what a topic sentence should be.