Can You Solve Equations?

I think I would choose communication through speech and the written word and mathematics because these are things that we use every day to express our thoughts and intentions to others. For example I am communicating my thoughts to you with this article but what about mathematics? Why should this be so important? Well we also use this tool every day when we go shopping, purchase petrol, check our salary slips for accuracy; examine our bank accounts and so on. The list is endless.
On a broader front there would be no roads, bridges, aircraft, radios and motor cars without mathematics so I hope you would agree that it is important. At the domestic level we use it every day with food recipes, mortgages, overdraughts and so on.
For example if you are shopping in a supermarket for eggs you will frequently see offers available such as box of 18 for £3.

99 and another box of 12 at £2.
99. Which is the better deal? Well the cost of the former is 22p each and the latter is 25p each.

If you bought a box every week, the difference in cost would be £1.
56 a year.
Now multiply this by all the shopping deals there are available and you can see that the savings you could make could be very significant. In this current economic climate it would pay you to search out the best deals and if necessary take a calculator with you - after all most mobile phones have a calculator on them these days.
It also pays to be aware of what you are paying out for loans and whether you have been overcharged. Many people have been and are receiving quite large amount of compensation as a result.

Now let's extend this a little.

Suppose you want to buy a children's tennis bat and some balls. The bats cost £3.00 and the balls cost 25p each.
It's been a heavy month and you only have £5.
00 available.
How many balls can you buy? Many people will be able to work this out in their head but few of them may know how to work this out with simple algebra - so let's try. First of all, let's work in the same units of money throughout. The bat costs 300p and the balls 25p each.
So we could write down: Price of bat + No of balls = 500 Now we know the price of the bat and the balls so this becomes: 300 + n x 25=500 (where n= the number of balls) Now in algebra it is usual to write n x 25 as 25n so we have: 300+25n=500 But now we want to find n and to do this we want to rearrange this to finish up with n= something so we subtract 300 from both sides, like this: 25n=500-300 and we get: 25n=200 To get n on its own we would now have to divide both sides by 25: n = 200 divided by 25 So n= 8 Now as I said earlier you could probably do this much faster in your head but if you have followed the reasoning, you have understood a mathematical equation.
The same reasoning and approach is used to construct and solve much more difficult equations which would be almost impossible to solve in your head which is why Algebra was invented.

Oh yes, and by the way mathematics is understood throughout the world. There are no language barriers!