A carpenter used 29 ft of molding in three pieces to trim a garage door. If the long piece was 1 ft longer than twice the length of each shorter piece, then how long was each piece?

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Answer 1 · 2016-12-03T02:16:28

Each of the shorter pieces was $7ft$ and the long piece was $15ft$ .

If we represent each of the shorter pieces by $x$ , then the long piece can be represented as $(2x+1)$ .

Since there are two short pieces, we can write an equation:

$x+x+(2x+1)=29$

Open the brackets and simplify.

$x+x+2x+1=29$

$4x+1=29$

Subtract $1$ from each side.

$4x=28$

Divide both sides by $7$ .

$x=7$

$:. (2x+1)=15$