Question

One number is 1 more than 2 times another. Their product is 10. Find the numbers.

Answer 1

Whenever a problem says "one number" and "another number" we can substitute x and y. for this we have x=2y+1 and xy=1. since we know the value of x (2y+1) we can substitute it for the other equation to get (2y+1)y=10. simplify to get 2y^2+y=10. from here you can do a few methods to solve this, but the simplest in my opinion is by factoring. 

In order to factor it must be equal to 0, so we have 2y^2+y-10=0. We factor this and get y=5 (we also get y=-4 but it is an extraneous root). now we can plug that into either equation and find that x=2.

this means our two numbers are 5 and 2