SOLUTION: A and B working together can do a job in 10 days. One takes 5 days less than the other to do the job when each works alone. How many days would it take each of them working alone t

Question 987576: A and B working together can do a job in 10 days. One takes 5 days less than the other to do the job when each works alone. How many days would it take each of them working alone to do the job?
P.S.: My math teacher said that the answer to this question is radicals
Thank you
Answer by vleith(2983) (Show Source): You can put this solution on YOUR website!
Lets assume a can do 1/A of the job in a day. and B can do 1/B of the job in a day.
You are told

You are also told that A can do the job in X days. B takes X+5 days

Now plug those values for A and B into the equation above

Solved by pluggable solver: SOLVE quadratic equation with variable

Quadratic equation (in our case ) has the following solutons:

For these solutions to exist, the discriminant should not be a negative number.

First, we need to compute the discriminant : .

Discriminant d=4.25 is greater than zero. That means that there are two solutions: .

Quadratic expression can be factored:

Again, the answer is: 17.8077640640442, -2.80776406404415. Here's your graph:

so A take 17.8 days and B takes 22.8 days by themselves
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