A Swiss Roll cake is 21cm long. When I cut it onto slices if I reduce the thickness of each slice by 1/4cm.

Taking x as the number of thicker slices, write down an equation in x and solve.

I just don't undertsand how to form the question.

how to do

shell to bells

To form the equation, we need to consider two things: the length of each slice and the number of slices.

Let's start by representing the thickness of each slice using x and the number of thick slices using t.

Given that the Swiss Roll cake is initially 21cm long, we can write the length of each slice as (21 - x) cm, where x represents the reduced thickness. Since the thickness reduces by 1/4 cm for every slice, the length of each subsequent slice can be expressed as (21 - (x + (1/4)t)) cm.

Now, let's consider the number of thick slices, which is represented as t. The number of thin slices would then be (x + (1/4)t).

To find the total length of the Swiss Roll cake, we multiply the length of each slice by the number of slices. Thus, we have the equation:

Total length = slice length × number of slices
21 = (21 - (x + (1/4)t)) × (x + (1/4)t)

To solve this equation, we need to find the values of x and t that satisfy the equation. However, since the given equation is quadratic, it might be challenging to obtain the exact solutions without additional information or restrictions on x and t.