Answer
The shorter piece is $12$ inches long whereas the longer piece is $24$ inches long.
Work Step by Step
To solve this problem, you need to translate the problem into an algebraic expression.
Let us set the shorter piece as $x$.
The longer piece we can set in terms of $x$. We know that the longer piece is twice as long as the shorter one, so this piece can be represented as:
longer piece $ = 2x$
We know that these two pieces added together should equal $36$ inches, so we can now put the pieces together and set up the equation:
$$36 = 2x + x$$
We combine like terms:
$$3x = 36$$
We solve for $x$ by dividing by $3$ on each side:
$$x = 12$$
The shorter piece is $12$ inches long.
To find the length of the longer piece, we plug in $12$ for $x$ for the expression we figured out to find the value of the longer piece:
longer piece $ = 2(12)$
The longer piece is 24 inches long.
