Step 2 Organize the information

After you ve determined what the question is (see the preceding section), you can go back to the problem and decide what information is needed and in what order you want to do the various steps. If you have an answer guess or goal in mind, it ll help you determine how the steps get arranged. 

The problem mentions the distance that Shelly and Shirley walked and the distance they re apart. Also, in the problem description you see times listed. You don t need the time they started and finished, because there s no mention of rates — requiring you to use d = rt. So just eliminate or ignore the mention of the times. It s just fluff. It also doesn t matter why Shirley walked slower it could have been that her legs are shorter. 

Shelly and Shirley leave their dorm at 8 a.m. and start walking in different directions. Shelly starts walking due north, and Shirley walks due east. Shirley takes her time to smell the flowers, and Shelly walks at a pretty steady pace. So, at noon, when they stop walking, Shelly has gone 1 mile less than twice as far as Shirley. At noon, they are 17 miles apart. How far did Shelly walk  

The problem involves two people walking in different directions and ending up 17 miles apart. If they walked in opposite directions — one north and one south — you d expect the sum of the distances they walked to be 17. Neither could have walked more than 17 miles. In this case, they walked at right angles from one another, so the sum of the distances that they walked has to be less than 17. Keeping in mind a reasonable answer, you re more likely to set up the process (equations and operations) properly. So some possible answers are that Shelly walked 10 miles and Shirley walked 5 miles. The numbers don t really need to fit or be the right answer. You just have a relationship in mind — that Shelly walked farther and the sum of their distances is less than 17. 

The question asks for the distance that Shelly walked. So you want some algebraic expression involving that distance. You could let the distance be represented by x. But look back at the problem to see what other distances are involved. You have the number 17 representing the distance between them, so you don t need a symbol for that distance. The only other distance is the distance that Shirley walked. You could let the distance that Shirley walked be represented by y, but then you d have two different variables — x and y — to worry about. You want to keep to one variable, if possible. 

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