How do you solve 3p-1=5(p-1)-2(7-2p)?

1 Answer
Mar 14, 2017

See answer in solution below.

Explanation:

To start, it's a good idea to being by distributing the numbers outside of both of the parentheses to get individual terms

3p - 1 = 5p - 5 -14 + 4p

Then we combine like terms on both sides to get

3p - 1 = 9p - 19

Then we want to get the terms with p on one side and all the terms without p on the other side. It doesn't matter which one goes where but I prefer working with a positive coefficient in front of my variable so let's subtract 3p from both sides and then add 19 to both sides to give us

18 = 6p

Then to get p alone we divide both sides by six which gives us

3 = p

And that is the final answer.