Exercise: Cinema box office
A function works out the price of a cinema ticket from age and student status, and a small main program asks for both and names the price.
See first: Decisions with if, elif and else
What you will learn
In this exercise you write the price rules of a cinema box office as a function, and afterwards you can:
- put several price rules with
if,elifandelsein the right order, so that the first matching one wins - return a price with
returnon every way through a function - turn a yes-or-no answer into a truth value with
strip(),lower()and==, however it was typed - pass a truth value as a parameter and use it in a condition without
== True - test the function on its own with edge cases, such as 5, 6, 17 and 18 years
Download as a script
python-exercise-ticket.py with the task as comments, to run in VS Code or Positron
Task
At the cinema box office these prices apply: children under 6 see the film
for free, anyone under 18 pays 6.00 euros, students pay 7.50 euros, and
everyone else 10.00 euros. Write a function ticket_price(age, student) that
gets the age as a number and, with student, a truth value, and returns the
matching price. A main program main asks for the age and then whether the
person is a student, and prints the price with two decimal places. For the
second question, yes should count in any spelling, so also Yes or YES,
and any other answer as no.
What it should look like
How old are you? 21
Are you a student? (yes/no) Yes
Your ticket costs 7.50 euros.Your program
def main():
age = int(input("How old are you? "))
answer = input("Are you a student? (yes/no) ")
# Turn the answer into a truth value, also for "Yes" or "YES".
student = False
price = ticket_price(age, student)
print(f"Your ticket costs {price:.2f} euros.")
def ticket_price(age, student):
# Check the rules in order and return the price.
return 0.0
main()Because ticket_price returns its result, you can also test it without any
input. To do so, temporarily replace the last line with
print(ticket_price(16, True)) and think beforehand about which price has to
come out.
SHOW HINT 1
Anyone under 6 is also under 18, and anyone who is already a student at 16
is still under 18. Because Python takes the first true condition with if
and elif, the narrowest rule belongs at the top: first under 6, then
under 18, then students, and else is left for everyone else.
SHOW HINT 2
answer.strip().lower() == "yes" already is the truth value you need for
student; no if is needed for it. Test the function at the edges: at 5
the film is free, at 6 it costs 6.00 euros, at 17 too, and only at 18 does
it cost 7.50 or 10.00 euros.
SHOW THE SOLUTION
def main():
age = int(input("How old are you? "))
answer = input("Are you a student? (yes/no) ")
student = answer.strip().lower() == "yes"
price = ticket_price(age, student)
print(f"Your ticket costs {price:.2f} euros.")
def ticket_price(age, student):
if age < 6:
return 0.0
elif age < 18:
return 6.0
elif student:
return 7.5
else:
return 10.0
main()The rules are ordered from the narrowest to the widest, because after the
first true condition return ends the function. At 21 the first two
conditions are false, and because student already is a truth value,
elif student: without == True is enough after that.
For the quick ones
Tuesday is cinema day: then every ticket that is not free anyway costs 2
euros less. Give ticket_price a third parameter cinema_day and let main
also ask whether today is Tuesday. Students then pay 5.50 euros, and a child
under 6 stays at 0.00 euros.
Details
- Level
- Beginner
- Modules
- Digitization and Programming
- In learning paths
- Python for beginners
- Code
8495- Updated
- 1 November 2026
- Status
- published