"What is the price?"
Translation:¿Cuál es el precio?
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Check here differences in uses of Cuál and Qué:
'Cuánto cuesta' means 'How much does it cost'.
To say 'What is the price' you have to say 'Cuál es el precio'.
You missed the tilde on "cuánto". Mind you, I put the same, with the tilde, and received the Duolingo raspberry nonetheless! Duolingo definitely favours literal over idiomatic.
Every diacritic has a name - tildes are very common in Portuguese, but only on ñ in Spanish - and the mark over "á" is an acute.
I believe the accent mark over "á" (or other vowels) s a "tilde". http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/tilde
I don't think they mean exactly the same thing, though. I believe you can ask ¿Cuánto cuesta? to ask how much it costs the city to run the bus system, but I think you'd only use ¿Cuál es el precio? when asking about an item that's for sale. English makes the same sort of distinction.
Why not está instead of es? I didn't figure that prices are a permanent quality?
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I know this site is encouraging learners to favor the understood meaning over the literal with examples like this, but sometimes it would be less confusing to just ask for the literal. I see "what" and I naturally want to type "que". If it said "which" I wouldn't have made the mistake and I still would have grasped the understood meaning.
Yeah but people don't say "which is the price" in english. This maybe should go under phrase section rather than questions since it's an exception to the rule.
very easy, "Cual" is usually used when you have to choose between or among several options, such as price, items, etc. Which one of these options do you prefer? =Cuál de estas opciones prefieres? You cannot say "Qué de estas opciones..."
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snooker is right. Also, qué is looking for a definition or an explanation. ¿Qué es el précio? would require an explanation of what "precio" means, along the line of: the amount of money you would have to pay to own this article.
Qué asks for a definition, and cuál asks for a certain one of a group of possibilities (even if they are not given or implied.) I usually remember it by thinking how to give a "smart aleck answer" in english. I once asked someone "¿Qué es tu nombre?" And he smartly responded, "the thing people call me." Whereas "¿Cuál es tu nombre?" means, "which (of all possible names) is your name?"
¿Qué gusto prefieres? (What flavour do you prefer?) -Algo delicado y dulce. (Something delicate and sweet; que when you have "unlimited choice") vs. ¿Cuál gusto prefieres, earl grey o té verde? (cual, like snooker said, when choices are "limited")
When this sentence was introduced to me the first time, DL have me: cuánto es el precio? And I responded with: how much is the price? And that was marked correct. But when I was given English to translate DL did not accept their own version in Spanish. They came back with "Cual" which sounded right to begin with. I thought the first Spanish version with "cuánto" sounded wrong but DL generated that.