SOLUTION: Victor has a piece of wood that is 56 cm long. He cuts the wood into two pieces so that the ratio of the legnth of the shorter piece is 3:4. What is the length of the longer piece?

Question 724682: Victor has a piece of wood that is 56 cm long. He cuts the wood into two pieces so that the ratio of the legnth of the shorter piece is 3:4. What is the length of the longer piece?
Answer by erika514(39) (Show Source): You can put this solution on YOUR website!
Okay.....
So we are going to set up an equation to go to the situation. Our equation is going to be 3x+4x=56. The solution for x will be multiplied by the coefficients to help find the length of the two pieces of wood. So, lets start solving...
First, we are going to combine our x terms to get 7x. We should now have 7x=56 as our equation. Finally to get our solution for x, we will divide each side by 7 to get simply x on the one side and 56 divided by 7 on the other side which is just 8. So your value for x is 8. We can now plug in 8 for x to find the lengths of the pieces of wood. So we need to put 8 in for all our x terms in the equation 3x+4x=56-->3(8)+4(8)=56. So our pieces are 24 and 32 cm. in length. Let's check to make sure we ar correct. So we have 24 and 32 for our lengths, so 24+32 is 56, and 56 equals 56. So we have the right lengths. Finally we look at our two values and determine that 32 cm. is longer than 24 cm., so our longer piece has a length of 32 cm. Good luck, let me know if you have any questions. :)
RELATED QUESTIONS
A piece of wood that is 36 inches long is cut into two pieces so that twice the longer... (answered by fractalier)

a 15-cm piece of wood is cut into two pieces. one piece is 7cm longer than the other. how (answered by stanbon)

Antonio is building a bookshelf. He has a piece of wood that measures 90 centimeters in... (answered by ReadingBoosters)

debbie cuts a piece of wood measuring 2(1)/(2)in into two equal pieces. how long is each... (answered by rfer,jim_thompson5910)

A piece of wood measures y cm in length and 3x cm in width. A worker intends to cut the... (answered by solver91311)

Martin is building a model. He cuts two pieces of wood that are each 613 inches long... (answered by ikleyn)

you have a piece of wood that is 84 inches long. you cut the wood into 3 pieces. the 2nd... (answered by lwsshak3)

Paul has a piece of wood that is 4 yards long. He knows there are 12 inches in 1 foot,... (answered by josgarithmetic)

One possible solution. Mike has 20 strips of wood molding that are each 70 inches long... (answered by josmiceli)