Hi everyone. I've been struggling with the following maths question for a while and I'm not sure where I went wrong.

Question

2(3x/5 - 1) = 10 and I need to solve for x
I first tried turning everything into fractions over 5 but that gave me the answer of 10/3 which I know is wrong because the back of my book says the answer is 10. Then I tried only turning the inside of the bracket into fractions over 5 but that gave me the same answer. Any help?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

2(3x/5 - 1) = 10
3x/5 - 1 = 5
3x/5 = 6
3x = 30
x = 10

Answer 2

Thanks so much :) so I needed to get rid of the bracket first?

Answer 3

well, first you had to get rid of the 2, so you could then concentrate on evaluating what was inside the brackets.

You could also have processed the brackets by multiplying by 2 on the left first:

2(3x/5 - 1) = 10
6x/5 - 2 = 10
6x/5 = 12
6x = 60
x = 10

Answer 4

Thank you very much.