The first problem!!!!

Hey everybody,

As promised yesterday, I will be posti....wait a second...today is the 7th right?? No?? It isn't?!?!

Whoops!!! Sorry everybody!!! I am definitely late in my posting. You know how life can just suck all your time away without even knowing it. I apologize and hope to be much more punctual.

This is the inaugural problem of my blog and, for this occasion, I have chosen to go with an Algebra 1 problem, something a little bit more easy. Specifically, the problem covers linear equations.

And here it is...

First thing to note is the fact that the equation is in standard form (i.e. Ax + By = C). For that reason, we are going to find the slope and y-intercept by simply converting the above equation into slope-intercept form (y = mx + b). Our goal is to then get the 'y' variable isolated, or by itself. The first step that we will take to accomplish this is to subtract '2x' from both sides like so...

Doing this cancels out the 2x on the left side of our equal sign, and results in the following equation...

Now, all that is left is to get rid of that -6. We are NOT going to add 6 though. Why? Because the -6 is multiplying the 'y' variable not adding/subtracting from it. Hence, we are going to divide both sides by -6 since division is the opposite of multiplication.

It is important to note in line 2 above that when we divide the right side of our equation by -6, we are dividing each term individually by -6, which results in our answer. Finally, we rearrange the terms in the final line above so as to have it in the order of slope-intercept, which was what was desired.

This means that m = 1/3 and b = -2 in our slope-intercept equation above. Thus, our slope is 1/3 and our y-intercept is -2.

I hope you enjoyed the very first problem/solution of this blog!! I hope it was clear and can actually be of some help to some!!

Don't forget to email any suggestions/questions to mathproblemaday@gmail.com

Until next time :)