SOLUTION: Yuri has a board that is 98 in long. He wishes to cut the board into two pieces so that one piece will be 10 in. longer than the other. What should the length of each piece be?

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Question 76919: Yuri has a board that is 98 in long. He wishes to cut the board into two pieces so that one piece will be 10 in. longer than the other. What should the length of each piece be?
Answer by bucky(2189) (Show Source):
You can put this solution on YOUR website!
Let x be the length of one piece of the board after the cut is made. The problem tells you
that the other piece will be 10 inches longer than x. So you have two pieces, x and x + 10.
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But if you add these two lengths, their sum must be the original length of the entire
board ... which the problem says is 98 inches. In equation form this is written as:
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On the left side we can combine the two x terms to get:
.

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Since we are going to solve for x, we need to eliminate the 10 on the left side. We do this
by subtracting 10 from both sides to get:
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And then we solve for x by dividing both sides by 2 to get:
.

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So one of the boards is 44 inches and the other board is 10 inches longer and this would
make it 54 inches.
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Check: the two pieces of board are 44 and 54 inches. If you glued them back together,
the sum of their lengths is 98 inches and this is the length of the board before it was
cut. So the solution is correct ... the boards are 44 and 54 inches.
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Hope this helps you to understand how to solve this problem.