Question

The length of a rectangle is 3 inches more than twice its width, and its area is 65 square inches. What is the width?

Answer 1

We can write a system of equations to solve a problem like this, based on the information we have.
We're given the area. We can use 'x' as a variable for length and 'y' as a variable for width.
We know 65 = x * y
We also are told that x = 3y + 2 (length is two more than 3 times the width).
Now, if you substitute x for (3y+2) in the first equation, you can just solve for y, which gives you the value of width.