Answer:
Step-by-step explanation:
Let "a" and "b" represent the circulations of papers 1 and 2 in thousands, respectively. From the problem statement, we have ...
a -b = 386
a +b = 2510
Adding these two equations gives ...
2a = 2896
a = 1448 . . . . . . divide by 2
b = 1448 -386 = 1062
The circulation numbers are 1448 thousand and 1062 thousand for papers 1 and 2, respectively.
_____
Comment on the problem and solution
This is what I call a "sum and difference" problem. You can see that we found the larger of the two numbers (paper 1 circulation) by adding the given numbers and dividing that result by 2.
This generic procedure can be used to solve any "sum and difference" problem: add the given numbers and divide by 2. This will give the larger of the two numbers being sought. The smaller one can be found by subtracting that from the sum, or by subtracting the difference. (In this problem, we subtracted the difference.)
