William D. Clark - Easy Math Step-by-Step: Master High-Frequency Concepts and Skills—Fast!

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Easy Math Step-by-Step is an interactive approach to learning basic math. It contains completely worked-out sample solutions that are explained in detailed, step-by-step instructions. Moreover, it features guiding principles, cautions against common errors, and offers other helpful advice as "pop-ups" in the margins.

The book takes you from number concepts to skills in elementary algebra and ends with simple descriptive statistics and graphical representation of data. Concepts are broken into basic components to provide ample practice of fundamental skills. The anxiety you may feel while trying to succeed in math is a real-life phenomenon. Many people experience such a high level of tension when faced with a math problem that they simply cannot perform to the best of their abilities. It is possible to overcome this difficulty by building your confidence in your ability to do math and by minimizing your fear of making mistakes. No matter how much it might seem to you that math is too hard to master, success will come.

Learning math requires lots of practice. Most important, it requires a true confidence in yourself and in the fact that, with practice and persistence, you will be able to say, "I can do this!" In addition to the many worked-out, step-by-step sample problems, this book presents a variety of exercises and levels of difficulty to provide reinforcement of math concepts and skills. After working a set of exercises, use the worked-out solutions to check your understanding of the concepts. We sincerely hope Easy Math Step-by-Step will help you acquire greater competence and confidence in using math in your future endeavors.

In this chapter, you learn about the various sets of numbers that make up the real numbers. The natural numbers (or counting numbers) are the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,...

The three dots indicate that the pattern continues without end. You can represent the natural numbers as equally spaced points on a number line, increasing endlessly in the direction of the arrow, as shown in . Figure 1.1 Natural numbers When you include the number 0 with the set of natural numbers, you have the whole numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,... The number 0 is a whole number, but not a natural number. Like the natural numbers, you can represent the whole numbers as equally spaced points on a number line, increasing endlessly in the direction of the arrow, as shown in . Figure 1.2 Whole numbers The graph of a number is the point on the number line that corresponds to the number, and the number is the coordinate of the point.

You graph a set of numbers by marking a large dot at each point on the number line corresponding to one of the numbers. The graph of the numbers 2, 3, and 7 is shown in . Figure 1.3 Graph of 2, 3, and 7

On the number line shown in , the point 1 unit to the left of 0 corresponds to the number 1 (read as negative one), the point 2 units to the left of 0 corresponds to the number 2, the point 3 units to the left of 0 corresponds to the number 3, and so on. The number 1 is the opposite of 1, 2 is the opposite of 2, 3 is the opposite of 3, and so on. The number 0 is its own opposite. Figure 1.4 Whole numbers and their opposites A number and its opposite are exactly the same distance from 0.

For instance, 3 and 3 are opposites, and each is 3 units from 0. The whole numbers and their opposites make up the