Question

Emma wants to use the distributive property to solve this equation.

Answer 1

The property states that you can divide both sides of an equation by the same number (of course it can't be zero). So, since we want to solve for $x$, but the equation involves $5x$, if we divided both sides by $5$ we would isolate $x$. In fact, the equation becomes

$\frac{5x}{5} = \frac{40}{5} \iff x=8$

And we have solved the equation, because we found the correct value of $x$.

Answer 2

the answer is x= 8, because 5 divided by 40 is 8