Dear Huntington Nursery,

Thank you for letting our class have the opportunity to help out with the
problem with the fencing kit for the garden. You have two gates and two
decorative pieces. Your gates are six feet long, and your decorative pieces
are five feet long. Although you had eight extra pieces that we had to figure
out how long they were each to make your garden even.
To figure out how long these eight pieces are, I had to find the length of
both sides including the eight extra pieces. I put the eight extra pieces as
X , and on each side of the fencing kit I placed two X s . On the side
where there is the decorative pieces, which are five feet long, I combined the
two

'

Xs

and the five. For the length of the sides with the decorative pieces

the length is 2 x +5 . I did the same for the sides that had the six foot pieces,
and the length for those sides is

2 x +6.

The next step I had to do was combine the two equations and set it equal
to the area which is 272. when combined the equation is

( 2 x +5 ) ( 2 x +6 )=272 . Now we have to set that equation to zero, by doing that

you take the numbers out of the parenthesis. Your next step in the equation
2
then looks like 2 x +5 2 x+ 6=272 you distribute and get 4 x +22 x242=0 .
Now we end up with quadratic equations, they are

x ( 2 x11 ) =0

and

11 ( 2 x+ 11 )=0 . You solve for both of them, and your answers are
and

x=11 . Since

have to use

x=

11

11
2

cant be a length for the eight extra pieces, you

11
2 , which reduces to

of the eight pieces will be

x=

5.5

5.5 . So for your extra pieces, each

feet long.