A Fast Food chain bout 2 pieces of land for new stores. The more expensive piece of land cost $21,988 more than less expensive of land,

Question

and the two pieces together cost $153,712. How much did each piece cost? 

Answer 1

The key to word problems is to figure out what values you know, what values you don't know, and how the words describe the relation between the known and unknown values. The trick here is to note that although there are two unknown values (the prices of each piece of land), is that you are given a value ($21,988) that allows you to express one of the unknowns as your variable (say x), and the other in terms of x.  There are times when some irrelevant piece of information is inserted into a word problem to make it more tricky. But usually every precise value will show up in the solution.