Example

Let’s look at a few examples.

Remember that the area of a rectangle is equal to the width times the height.

A = w x h

Express the following formula in terms of width.

To solve this equation we need to get the width term (w) on one side by its self. So we can divide both sides by the height term (h) to get eh following solution:

A = w x h
 

Which will reduce to:

So why might you want to do this? Well lets say you knew the area and heights for many rectangles and wanted to get the width of each, well by manipulating the formula we can now quickly solve the equation for the variable we are most interested in.

Example

Let’s try another example:

Solve the following for Y1: Y = 6(Y₂ – Y₁)

In this example we will start by dividing both sides by 6.

Next we add Y1 to both sides and then subtract Y/6 from both sides:

Now we have solved this equation for Y₁, and we see that it is equal to Y₂ minus Y divided by 6.