Kathy,

Look at the response that Melanie sent to your question yesterday. She started by assigning letters to the unknown quantities, in the current problem the two unknown numbers. Call one of them a and the other b. Then take the two sentences in the problem

• Five times a number minus a second number is 6.
  
  
• The sum of the numbers is 12.

Using a and b write these sentences as equations. Solve the equations.

Penny