Two 2 1/2 inch plastic strips and two 5 1/3 inch plastic strips are used to form a rectangle. what is the perimeter of the rectangle?

The perimeter of the rectangle is

To solve this, we are going to use the formula for the perimeter of a rectangle:

where

is the perimeter of the rectangle

is the width of the rectangle

is the length of the rectangle

We can infer from our problem the the shorter strips are inches, so . That leaves us with . Let's replace those values in our formula to find :

because linear equations are a lot simpler than quadratics equations, and linear equations formula is a lot easier to memorize. that's why i think they're harder.