Lesson Preview | Objectives

Lesson Preview

The reason for learning mathematics is to answer questions and solve problems. You can use algebra to get these answers when you learn how to use it. To solve a problem, you first need to say what the problem is using words. Then, you should put the important facts about the problem on paper. It's like detective work - using clues that you know to find out what you need to know. 

That is what you will be doing in this lesson; finding out what you need to know by solving mathematical equations. You will be surprised to see how easy it is to solve many problems with mathematics, once you learn how to use clues to help you write equations to solve the problems.

Objectives

When you complete this lesson, you will be able to solve word problems by:

• Putting important facts (what you do know) about the problems on paper.
    
• Figuring out how to represent unknowns (what you don't know) that you want to find.
   
• Writing equations that show how the unknown facts are related to the known facts.
   
• Solve the equations by using algebra.

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