Question

The sum of Carrie's age and her best friend's age is 28. The difference between their ages is 2 years. Carrie is the older of the two. How old is Carrie?

Answer 1

Let age of Carrie be x and age of her best friend's is y..

So. you are given that sum of age of Carrie and her best friend is 28..

So, x + y = 28

Answer 2

Carrie you there??

Answer 3

In my opinion x and y are way overused for no reason.

Represent Carrie's age with a C and her friend's age with an F. It will be less abstract.

Answer 4

Sorry, @kiara17 you there?

Answer 5

I love these kind of problems so much

Answer 6

Thanks for opinion..

But in my opinion, my small case letter assumptions are better than upper case assumptions.

I will not keep on doing SHIFT + C or CAP C for no reason.. :P

Answer 7

one more for @kiara17 for practice

Answer 8

Whenever you come across a word problem, try to just read through it word by word and try to make every word you can into a math symbol.

So when it says, "sum" write down a '+' and now you can think, ok, to add I need at least two things.

"Carrie's age and her best friend's age"

Now what are they? We don't know, this is where algebra is coming in. We have to represent these two unknowns as variables, so we can just make up our own letters to represent these, so on either side of our '+' we can write 'C' for Carrie's age and 'F' for her friend's age. Now let's keep going!

"is 28" Whenever you see the word "is" that will usually mean an equals sign. If I say 2 plus 3 is 5 you automatically know that we can replace the 'is' with an equal sign right? So now what's it equal to? Looks like 28.

So we've constructed one equation. There's one more to go, try your best to go through it one piece at a time and see if you can come out with something that looks right.

Answer 9

@No.name I like this! If you imagine all the animals on one scale at the same time, you'd have 2 of each animal exactly, so we just need to divide the total of these by 2, pretty fun do you have more of these?

Answer 10

Nope , not right now but i when i get it i will share it on Os :)

Answer 11

Exactly , maths should be treated like any other fun adventure sport , i don't understand why schools make it so boring , math is much more creative than teachers at schools imagine it to be

Answer 12

Yeah, you might like to read Lockhart's Lament, it's basically pretending there's a world where children are forced to write sheet music in class and notes on paper without ever hearing music or being allowed to sing or play instruments because that's too advanced.

https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf