Can I just inquire kurt, when you approached this questions, what sort of method did you use. Did you approach this graphically etc... because in all trufully, this dosent make any sense to me whatsoever in why equn 1 was subbed into equn 2...
The last question you asked involved a bit more problem solving. I had no idea what to do. So when you start a problem, instead of jumping in and jumbling up equations to try some how push a solution out, think about ways to go about solving the problem.
Doing it graphically doesn't look to promising because its such an ugly expression, if it is even possible to graph it then it would take a lot of time and all you could get is an approximation. So we can just forget about graphing for this problem. This is a problem, and with mathematics problems we must always assume that there is a nice solution, that there is a logical way to arrive at a solution.
One problem solving technique is "Identify what makes the problem hard".
So look at the problem, what makes it difficult. Well we have this ugly expression. But the hardest part is that it is expressed in 2 variables - x and y. So what do we want to do? We want to get rid of the hard part. So we want to find a way to have this expression in just one variable, say x. If we get this then we can easily reduce this problem to finding the minimum of a simple function.
How do we do this? Another important part of problem solving is identifying important facts in the question, these are clues. Usually you will have to eventually use all the information given in a mathematics problem. So what is given
Well the thing that stands out at us is
x + y = 1
Why would they just drop this into the question. From this we get the idea to make x the subject ie y = 1 - x. So here we have it, a way to take out the uglyness =)