Last week, in Number Sense 029 we added and subtracted nothing from our equations, and found that to be a useful technique.
Up until now, we have been dealing with one unknown, one goat, and we have come up with methods for finding the value of that goat. But what do we do when we have more than one unknown?
Real problems are considerably messier than the simple problems we set up to teach basic ideas, simple problems are rarely encountered in the real world, or, when they are, can be solved with the most simple mechanical methods.
Have you ever played cards? When you dealt the cards, did you think your were dividing a certain number of cards by the number of players? Probably not. You just dealt the cards, one at a time, to each player in turn. A simple real world mathematical problem, solved so simply that few people even think they are doing math when they solve that problem.
This week we will begin to look at problems where there are two unknown quantities, somehow related to each other.
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