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

1 Answer
Apr 10, 2016

#6a+7#

Explanation:

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.