Question

How do you solve for x in `-10=xy+z`?

Answer 1

Perform algebraic actions to move x to one side of the equal sign and all other terms onto the other and get `x=(-10-z)/y`

Explanation:

When asked to solve for something, you want to have that "something" on one side of the equal sign and everything else on the other.

So let's start with this problem:

`-10 = xy+z`

To solve for x, we want x by itself and everything else on the other side of the equal sign. The first thing we should do is move all the terms that don't have x in them to one side and all the terms with x on the other, like this:

`-10 -z = xy` (we subtracted z from both sides of the equation)

Now we can divide by y to put that on the other side of the equal sign:

`(-10-z)/y=x`

And lastly, usually we put the thing we're solving for on the left side and everything else on the right, so let's rewrite as:

`x=(-10-z)/y`