Question

Does anyone who is good at algebra have any tips on setting up word problems?

Answer 1

Try to imagine that every question is written by a bitter person whose greatest joy is to trick you and watch you lose points on quizzes.

I'm just kidding. It would be a big help if you knew all the common words that can be used for the different operations, for example if you have 3 pies and you add 2 pies.... recognize that a + symbol is needed there. Watch out for the tricky negative operations, because it really makes a huge difference is you have 5 of something and take x away from it, or of you take 5 away from x. Not the same thing, and I see a lot of people struggle with recognizing the difference at first.

Also, most of the word problems (or application problems) will be based on whatever you were learning in that particular section (and all the math you have learned before...). So if you are learning about quadratic equations then you should expect that if you "translated" the word problem correctly it should look similar to the other quadratic equation exercises you were working on in that section.