Afather and his son clean the house together in 2 hours. when the son works alone, it takes him an hour longer to clean than it takes his dad alone. find how long it takes the son to clean alone.

It takes the son one and half hours to clean the house. To find this you need the equations F+S=2 and F+1=S. (F=father and S=son) You take the F+1 and substitute it in for S in F+S to get F+(F+1)=2. Then you combined like factors, 2F+1=2, and simplify to get F=.5hr. After this you plug .5 in to F+1=S to get (.5)+1=S, meaning it takes the son 1.5 hour to clean the house.