GED Math Word Problems…

Hey, yo. Here’s a question by Tanya that Liz forwarded me from her blog:

Im about to take my math test,I am horrible in math.right now I am working on word probloms.How do I know if these word probloms are asking me to subtract,divide,multiply or add.please help.

Yeah! Tough, ain’t it? But the GED wants to know if you can do math on the fly, you know. That’s why they give you word problems. Like, you’re waitin’ in the line at the supermarket. Do you got enough money for what’s in your cart? How do you know? You’ve got to choose what math to do to figure it out… in this case, ADD together everything in your cart, and SUBTRACT from how much money you’ve got.

Try to think through the problem in concrete terms. Picture it. How do the diff’rent numbers relate to each other?

ADD if you need to find a total, figure out what more than one thing together is. For example, if you deposit $40, $160 and $30 in your bank, and you started out with $200, how much you got? You ADD because you’re trying to find out what it is all together.  $200 + $40 + $160 + $30 = $430. That’s more than I got!

SUBTRACT if you need to find the difference between two things or what you got left over, or how much bigger one thing is than another. For example, how much more will you save from buying the $150 TV instead of the $180 TV? Subtract, because you need to find out how much more one is than the other. $180 – $150 = $30 saved by buyin’ the cheaper TV.

MULTIPLY if you need to find out the total of something repeated over a number of years, over a number of miles. For example, if you’re going to drive 40 miles to the beach, and each mile costs $0.10 in gas, how much will the drive cost in gas? You need 10 cents for each mile… and that’s what MULTIPLICATION is for. All you gotta do is multiply 40 x $0.10 to get $4.00 in gas for the whole trip.

DIVIDE if you need to find out a part of something, or how something separates into even amount. So, if Karen paid $45 for 5 of the same scarf to give to people for Christmas, how much is one scarf? It’s 45 ÷ 5 = $9 for each scarf. DIVIDING divides a number into equal parts.

That’s the quick low-down. Here’s some resources for more info on word problems…

http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.word.problems.html

http://academic.cuesta.edu/acasupp/as/706.htm

http://www.studygs.net/mathproblems.htm

And get some practice…

http://www.satmathpro.com/SMP_WordProblems.html

For more information about the GED test and GED test preparation, visit the GED Academy at http://www.passGED.com.