I don't know how many pounds of soil to get for my 8 garden beds. I want the 5 over here and the 3 over there to have the same amount of soil in them.
Slajd: 2
The easiest way to find out is an equation like5(x-2) = 3(x+3)The five and the three are the garden beds, the -2 is the soil already in the 5 beds and the +3 is the hole in the 3 beds. The xes are the amount of soil.
That sounds great but I have no idea how to do that.
That's okay I can show you.
Slajd: 3
The first thing you want to do is get rid of the parentheses, so we look at what is outside of them, which is the 5 and the 3. Multiply the 5 by the x and the -2 that are on that side with the five, then multiply the 3 by the x and +3 that are also on the same side as the 3. Now that we've done that, the equation should look like 5x-10=3x+9. Now we need to do inverse operations by adding the 10 to the 9 that is on the other side of the equation. Then minus the 3x from the 5x so your equation looks like 2x=19. Lastly, we need x by itself, so we need to divide 19 by 2 which gives us 9.5. So, you need to buy 10 pounds of soil and have some left over.