Free Basic Math and Pre-Algebra For Dummies by Mark Zegarelli Page A

student. Many would rather swim across a moat full of hungry crocodiles than “figure out how many bushels of corn Farmer Brown picked” or “help Aunt Sylvia decide how many cookies to bake.” But word problems help you understand the logic behind setting up equations in real-life situations, making math actually useful — even if the scenarios in the word problems you practice on are pretty far-fetched.
    In this chapter, I dispel a few myths about word problems. Then I show you how to solve a word problem in four simple steps. After you understand the basics, I show you how to solve more-complex problems. Some of these problems have longer numbers to calculate, and others may have more complicated stories. In either case, you can see how to work through them step by step.
Dispelling Two Myths about Word Problems
    Here are two common myths about word problems:
Word problems are always hard.
Word problems are only for school — after that, you don't need them.
    Both of these ideas are untrue. But they're so common that I want to address them head-on.
Word problems aren't always hard
    Word problems don't have to be hard. For example, here's a word problem that you may have run into in first grade:
Adam had 4 apples. Then Brenda gave him 5 more apples. How many apples does Adam have now?
    You can probably do the math in your head, but when you were starting out in math, you may have written it down:
4 + 5 = 9
    Finally, if you had one of those teachers who made you write out your answer in complete sentences, you wrote “Adam has 9 apples.” (Of course, if you were the class clown, you probably wrote, “Adam doesn't have any apples because he ate them all.”)
    Word problems seem hard when they get too complex to solve in your head and you don't have a system for solving them. In this chapter, I give you a system and show you how to apply it to problems of increasing difficulty. And in Chapters 13 , 18 , and 23 , I give you further practice solving more difficult word problems.
Word problems are useful
    In the real world, math rarely comes in the form of equations. It comes in the form of situations that are very similar to word problems.
    Whenever you paint a room, prepare a budget, bake a double batch of oatmeal cookies, estimate the cost of a vacation, buy wood to build a shelf, do your taxes, or weigh the pros and cons of buying a car versus leasing one, you need math. And the math skill you need most is understanding how to turn the
situation
you're facing into numbers that you calculate.
    Word problems give you practice turning situations — or stories — into numbers.
Solving Basic Word Problems
    Generally, solving a word problem involves four steps:
Read through the problem and set up a
word equation
— that is, an equation that contains words as well as numbers.
  Plug in numbers in place of words wherever possible to set up a regular math equation.
Use math to solve the equation.
Answer the question the problem asks.
    Most of this book is about Step 3. This chapter and Chapters 13 , 18 , and 23 are all about Steps 1 and 2. I show you how to break down a word problem sentence by sentence, jot down the information you need to solve the problem, and then substitute numbers for words to set up an equation.
    When you know how to turn a word problem into an equation, the hard part is done. Then you can use the rest of what you find in this book to figure out how to do Step 3 — solve the equation. From there, Step 4 is usually pretty easy, though at the end of each example, I make sure you understand how to do it.
Turning word problems into word equations
    The first step to solving a word problem is reading it and putting the information you find into a useful form. In this section, I show you how to squeeze the juice out of a word problem and leave the pits behind!
Jotting down information as word equations
    Most word problems give you information about numbers,