Answer: 5/7
Explanation:
You start with 6 + 8(x - 1) = 2(3x + 4)
Wow. That looks like a lot, so you need to take it one step at a time. Because of PEMDAS (Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally), which gives us the order of Parentheses (), Exponents(Baby Numbers), Multiply or Divide from left to right according to where it is in the problem, and Add or Subtract from left to right according to where it is in the problem, you need to look at your parentheses first. Let’s start with
8(x - 1). 8 is touching those parentheses all by itself, so it’s being multiplied with the stuff in the parentheses. 8 times x is 8x and 8 times 1 is 8. That gives you
6 + 8x - 8 = 2(3x + 4)
Do the same thing with 2(3x + 4). 2 is touching those parentheses all by itself so you multiply it by the stuff inside to get 6x + 8. You now have
6 + 8x - 8 = 6x + 8
But where do we go from here? Okay well what you’re trying to do is get a single x by itself on one side of the equals and the answer on the other side. So, we have
6 + 8x - 8 = 6x + 8
Let’s start on the left side with 6 + and - 8. If you have 6 and you take 8 away, you can’t because you’ll still need 2, so 6 - 8 = -2. That leaves you with
8x - 2 = 6x + 8
Then, you take the 6x from the right side and add it to the 8x on the left. You have 14x. This gives you
14x - 2 = 8
Look at -2. We want to get rid of that, so we would do the opposite of - which is + so we would add.
14x - 2 = 8
+ 2 + 2
——————
14x = 10
Now look at 14x, which is the same as 14 times x. The opposite of multiplying is dividing so divide.
14x = 10
/14 /14
X = 10/14 which simplifies into 5/7
