How do you simplify $4a + 7 + 2a$ ?

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Answer 1 · 2016-04-10T19:35:58

$6a+7$

Consider money for a moment. I am English so I am going to use £

Suppose you had 4 lots of £5 notes in your wallet. You then added a further 2 lots of £5 notes. The total lots of £5 would be 4+2.

Ok, we are using the letter 'a' but the same principle applies.

So we have

$(4a+2a)+7$

This is the same as

$6a+7$

The actual value of $a$ does not matter for this action. All you are doing is counting how many of $a$ you have got.

How do you simplify 4a + 7 + 2a4a + 7 + 2a?