Question 551233: how do you solve for the unknown of x/3 -7/8 = 2/5(x + 15/4) any help would be greatly appreciated. Answer by bucky(2189) (Show Source):
You can put this solution on YOUR website! Given to solve for x:
.
.
There are a number of different things we could do to make the problem a little easier. A lot of students have trouble with fractions, so let's begin by getting rid of the fractions. The right side of the equation may cause us a little trouble, so let's begin by doing the distributed multiplication on the right side. Do that by multiplying times each of the two terms in the parentheses to get:
.
.
When you multiply out the last term on the right side [that is when you multiply ] you get which is . So you can now write the equation as:
.
.
Now to get rid of the fractions, we can multiply every term on both sides by the product of all the denominators. That is multiply every term by . (We could use 120, but using 240 does not cause a problem).
.
When we multiply by 240 the equation becomes:
.
.
Now in each of the four terms, let's divide the denominator into the 240 in the numerator to get:
.
.
Multiply out all the terms and you have:
.
.
This is in a form that is more like an ordinary algebraic equation. Start by subtracting 96x from both sides:
.
.
Next add 210 to both sides:
.
.
Solve for x by dividing both sides by -16 to get:
.
.
and since both 570 and -16 are divisible by 2 this can be reduced to:
.
.
Or by dividing it out, you can get the decimal equivalent form:
.
.
Hope this helps you to understand the problem a little better. Sometimes it helps to make the problem a little easier by getting rid of the fractions, and you can do that by multiplying all terms by a common denominator (the product of all denominators) and then getting rid of each denominator by dividing it into the common denominator.
.
(