BusinessTechnical Mathematics

Accessibility Statement

BCcampus Open Education believes that education must be available to everyone. This means supporting the creation of free, open, and accessible educational resources. We are actively committed to increasing the accessibility and usability of the textbooks we produce.

Accessibility of This Textbook

This textbook is an adaptation of an existing textbook that was not published by us. Due to its size and the complexity of the content, we did not have capacity to remediate the content to bring it up to our accessibility standards at the time of publication. This is something we hope to come back to in the future.

In the mean time, we have done our best to be transparent about the existing accessibility barriers and features below:

Known Accessibility Issues and Areas for Improvement

• Math content in this book is written in LaTeX and rendered as images using the WP-QuickLaTeX plugin. The alt text for these images is the LaTeX code, which requires people to be familiar with LaTeX to understand it. This could be improved by converting the LaTeX so it can be rendered by MathJax instead, which can be interpreted by screen readers.
• Most images are not accessible. They do not have adequate alt text or image descriptions even when describing new concepts.
• Some images rely on colour to show how equations are transformed.
• Not all tables include a title or caption.

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Operations with Real Numbers

The chart below shows us how the number sets fit together. In this chapter we will work with rational numbers, but you will be also introduced to irrational numbers. The set of rational numbers together with the set of irrational numbers make up the set of real numbers.

Use Variables and Algebraic Symbols

In algebra, letters of the alphabet are used to represent variables.

Letters often used for variables are .

Variables and Constants

• A variable is a letter that represents a number or quantity whose value may change.
• A constant is a number whose value always stays the same.

To write algebraically, we need some symbols as well as numbers and variables. There are several types of symbols we will be using. There are four basic arithmetic operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. We will summarize them here, along with words we use for the operations and the result.