Question

can someone please help me and explain to me how to do this???
Jared has a wooden board that is 11 ft long. He wants to cut it into two pieces so that the longer piece is 4 ft less than 4 times the length of the shorter piece.



How long will each piece of board be?



Shorter piece: ft

Longer piece: ft

Answer 1

the trick here is to represent the lengths of the shorter boards algebraically.

Let s represent the length of the shorter board, and L the length of the longer.

write a formula for the length of the longer board, L, in terms of s, the length of the shorter board.

Answer 2

4L-4 is that what you mean?

Answer 3

The problem statement says that the longer side is 4 less than 4times the length of the shorter board (s). Why use L?

Answer 4

sorry im not thinking straight i am just tired

Answer 5

4s-4 ???

Answer 6

@mathmale

Answer 7

L=4s-4 is correct.

then, if s is the length of a short side, L=4s-4 is the length of a long side.

Answer 8

These are the math'l representztions of the lengths of the longer and shorter boards (ignore what I said about "long side" and "short side".

Answer 9

the two boards (of different lengths) have a total length of ??? (it's given).

Adding the length of the short board to the length of the long board gives you what algebraic expression?

Equate this algebraic expression to the length of the original board (before it was cut).

Then solve the resulting equation for s.

Answer 10

then find L.