Subtraction
Any English phrase in which one quantity is taken away from another translates into a mathematical expression with a minus sign. You've seen those self-help books about dealing with loss? Those...
Division
Sometimes we have a direct translation from English to math, since the symbol ÷ abbreviates the phrase "divided by.'' None of that shady "together with" or "product of" business.Like so: five d...
Translating Slowly
Don't you hate it when someone's translating something from another language and they go so quickly that you can't keep up? We hate that, too. We also hate it when we need to go from English to mat...
Inequalities
We have four possible inequality signs to choose from: , ≤, and ≥. There's also the slightly less popular ^, which means that everything below is greater than everything above, but t...
Written Inequalities
Some word problems lead us to inequalities rather than equations, which is good, because algebra would be awfully boring if we never got to mix it up. We know what you're thinking, but don't say...