How To Do Pre - Algebra

Hi, my name is Charles and I am one of the math teachers from the Maxim workshop, I am just going to teach you, now, how to do some mathematics. In this video, I am going to teach you how to do pre-algebra , now the basis of algebra is association and then assigning, so the first thing we want to do is associate particular objects that have similarities and then we look at the convenience of assigning values to them or variables. So, just imagine if in a particular school we found that we had five people with the name John Smith and we also found that we had nine people with the name Tim Matthews and then we found that we had four people with the name Sam Peters.

Now, this has already shown us that we have associated particular individuals by similarities that they share in their names. Now the next thing would be to assign a particular thing that allows us to shorten these similarities, so it is easier for us to relate them time and time again. Now a classic example when you would do that is just when you would say call your friend by a shortening name that he has, so to give him a nick name pretty much, so that's pretty much what we are going to do these names to shorten them and the easiest thing when doing that is just shorten them to their initials.

So we got JS, we got TM and we have got SP. Now the convenience that we have now when we want to relate to John Smith, we can just say JS. So I will just rub this out and bring them together, JS, and when we want to relate to Tim Matthews, we can just relate or call him by TM, and when we want to relate to Sam Peters or all the Sam Peters, we say SP.

Now this is first of all, we have shown how to associate and now assign them particular shortened versions of their names to these symbols here, this is the same principle in algebra, what we want to do is get a particular thing that varies. So obviously with the names here, the individuals that had that name or the variables, how many of them is the measurement that we want to take. So if you look to rainfall over the course of months, you might just call rainfall, RF.

And this becomes a lot easier to use in mathematics. You don't want to always be writing that 2 times rainfall, all the time. And just imagine in one of those in the papers where you have a certain question being answered and you see a whole sheet being used to derive possible answers, you don't want to have to see this all the time, so we make the short one of this and it becomes 2 times RF.

Now the one that you are going to be commonly using most of the time is x. So, x is a good term for the unknown. So when you want to relate to say the individual people's heights within your class, you might say height is equaled to x and weight which is another variable might be equaled to w, and if you are studying something like Physics or Chemistry and even Biology, when you want to know the time that takes for a chemical reaction to take place or the time that it takes for an athlete to run a certain distance, you might use the idea of small t as the time.

Obviously these would have the units of meters or centimeters and this would have units of seconds and that's basically how to do pre-algebra.