Equations with parentheses can represent a variety of situations. 

1. Lin volunteers at a hospital and is helping prepare 10 toy baskets for children who are patients. After Lin adds 2 items to each basket, the supervisor says 140 items have been equally placed in the baskets. Lin wants to know how many toys were in each basket before she added items.
2. A large store has the same number of workers on each of 2 teams to handle different shifts. The managers decide to add 10 workers to each team, bringing the total number of workers to 140. An executive at the company that runs this chain of stores wants to know how many employees were in each team before the increase.

Each basket in the first story has an unknown number of toys, , that is increased by 2. Then 10 groups of give a total of 140 toys. An equation representing this situation is . Since 10 times an amount is 140, that amount is 14, which is the total number of items in each basket. Before Lin added the 2 items there were or 12 toys in each basket.

The executive in the second story knows that the size of each team of employees has been increased by 10. There are now 2 teams of each. An equation representing this situation is . Since 2 times an amount is 140, that amount is 70, which is the new size of each team. The value of is or 60. There were 60 employees on each team before the increase.