Posted on 01/09/2012 9:45:26 PM PST by The SISU kid
I agree completely. I have fond memories of setting up a problem in calculus and graphing it by finding the intercepts and where it was increasing or decreasing. It really helped visualize the equation.
I had a professor for linear algebra who had an interesting comment about the back of the book. He said many of the student assistants who are assisting the professor who is authoring the book try to come up with the most compact way to express the answer. Which is why in many cases the answer you come up with looks nothing like what is printed in the book.
This is what my wife said when she looked at this thread.
just thought I would pass it on.
What you have there is a problem with notation.
Those brackets [ and ] don’t make sense.
Most of the people responding looked at them as if they were parenthesis ( and ), which would be correct if there was a set of parenthesis already in the equation, but there is not.
4(4-5x) = 6x + 4
If they were, then 6/13 would be correct.
Those trying to get the 10/7 answer were looking for absolute value, but the notation for that is straight lines | and |, not brackets.
4 |4-5x| = 6x + 4
The only way the brackets alone in the equation would work is if it represented a matrix in linear algebra. But then the equation would be wrong, 4 [4-5x] = [16-20x], not 6x + 4
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