ShmoopTube

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Here's your Shmoop du jour...

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Solve for X.

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3x plus seven X plus nine equals 35 and here are the potential answers:

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Okay, so what is this problem asking us to do?

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Well, it's really just a straightforward "Solve for X" dance.

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We just combine terms to simplify and we're there...

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...wherever there is....but okay we have 3x, 7x which we can add

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to get 10x. We can subtract 9 from both sides

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35 -9 is 26, so we have 10x equals 26.

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Now divide both sides by 10

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and X equals 26 over 10. Done.

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Wait...not done...there's no 26 over 10 in the answers.

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What did we do wrong? Well, we need to reduce.

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10 and 26 are even numbers

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so if nothing else we can divide 2 into each of them evenly

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and getting now reduced 13 over 5 which ta-da

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is here. Answer C.

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