How you would get the answer is you first start adding your like term on one side so -3x to cancel that out would be +3x and add that to 5x which you would get 8x now. So now the left side would look like 5+1 and you add that so 6=8x-2 so now you would add 2x to the negative x that cancels now you do the same thing to the other side 2+6=8 so now the equation would look like 8=8x now you divide 8x by 8 to cancel out the 8 do that on both sides, so how many times does 8 go into 8 , only once so that how the answer is 1. Hope this explains it enough for you!