Math Question

[Stonetree]

I earnt those exclamation points by doing maths!!!!!

Exclamation points are my right!!!!!!

I forgot you are English, I am more familiar with using the word "Math" and you use the word, "Maths". (I'm not reporting you)

 

[Eddi]

I forgot you are English, I am more familiar with using the word "Math" and you use the word, "Maths". (I'm not reporting you)

I think both ways of spelling it make sense in their own way

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

My first thought is 1.5+(.4x)= x
Am I approaching this right?

Yes. That is correct.

It would seem that if you knew enough to set up the problem, you'd also know how to solve for X yourself. Plenty of people can't do that math, but they also couldn't have gotten as far as you did.

Others have solved the problem for you. What they were doing is trying to isolate X to end up with an equation in the form X = a, where "a" is a dollar amount. So, they employed four standard techniques to do that:

[1] We move a term from one side of an equation to the other by subtracting it from both sides.
[2] We remove coefficients from variables by dividing both sides by the coefficient.
[3] Simply by combining terms where possible
[4] Flipping the equality around

So let's look at the solution using those techniques beginning with

1.5 + 0.4X = X (the unit for 1.5 is dollars)

To move 0.4X to other side of the equal sign, subtract that amount from both parts of your equation. If the two sides of the equation were equal before, and you change them equally, they're still equal:

1.5 + 0.4X - 0.4X = X - 0.4X [1]

Now simplify by combining the two pairs of X terms, which makes it disappear from the side where you subtracted it from itself, thus isolating the variable X from the constant term (1.5, or $1.50):

1.5 = 0.6X [3]

Now we want to remove the coefficient 0.6 from the variable X, so we divide both sides of the equation by 0.6:

1.5/0.6 = X [2]

Simplify again:

2.5 = X [3]

and flip the equation around:

X = 2.5 (dollars) [4]

This is what we wanted. In English, this says that the selling price is $2.50

A woman recently told me that learning algebra was a waste of time, since she never uses it. I explained to her that when makes a recipe for more or fewer people than the printed recipe serves, she's using algebra. If it takes six eggs to serve 8, but you only are cooking for four, to solve for X (number of eggs needed), we need these same techniques even if we do it intuitively instead of as a series of steps on paper.

 

[The Hammer]

At least now I know how much a rooster costs.


... A couple boks.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

Wow, everyone else has given the same answer as me!!!!

Looks as though I was right

I can't quite believe it I feel so clever

One thing I like about math is there's usually more than one way to do it.
However solving for one problem may not actually work beyond that one problem. The way I do math I totally failed one section when I worked out the first problem, it worked, but turns out what I did did not work for the rest of the problems.

 

[Revoltingest]