From the course: Learning Everyday Math

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Solving equations

Solving equations

From the course: Learning Everyday Math

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Solving equations

- In this movie, I'm going to explain how to solve an equation. In other words, how to use math to find a number that we don't know yet. So you probably remember these from school, I'll give you an example, the typical equation. So if you look at this equation, we have a few different things going on. Our ultimate goal, really, is to isolate x. We want to end up with something that looks like x equals a number, so we know what x is. To isolate x, basically, we're going to have to do the same thing to both sides of the equation. So we don't change numbers, just on a whim. So, remember, order of operations matter. Remember PEMDAS, so, we want to look around we don't see any parentheses, we don't see any exponents, but we do see multiplication and division. And the first thing I'm going to deal with is the division, I see that I have 3x plus two divided by four. So I'm going to multiply both sides of the equation by four, because it's the opposite of dividing by four. So remember the…

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