Real-World Equations

Pre-Algebra · Axiom Academy

LESSON Translating Word Problems to Equations A word problem is a story with math inside — learn to name the unknown, turn the relationship into an equation, and solve it. 1. Sort What You Know from What You Want Here's our first situation. You and your friends go to the movies. Adult tickets cost 12 each and student tickets cost 8 each. Your group buys 3 adult tickets and some student tickets, and the total comes to 60 . How many student tickets did you buy? Before writing anything, read the story once and split every number into two piles: the values the problem gives you , and the single thing it asks you to find . The animation below scans the sentence and drops each number into its pile. You can't compute with a question mark, so replace it with a letter. The quantity we want — the number of student tickets — becomes the variable s . From now on, every place the story says "student tickets," we can write s instead. Let s stand for the thing we're solving for The variable is what the question asks for — "how many student tickets?" — never a number you already know. Any letter works (s, x, n). Choosing s — for "student" — just makes the equation easy to read. 3. Turn the Relationship into an Equation Now find the sentence hiding in the story that relates everything. Here it's about money: the cost of the adult tickets plus the cost of the student tickets equals the total . Translate each phrase into math and the equation builds itself.

This is the written version of the interactive lesson above. See the full Pre-Algebra course.