Indeed, pretty much all of college algebra just involves learning the various pairs of operations (mult/div, add/sub, square/sqroot, e^/log(), sin()/sin()^-1) and then applying them to both sides of an equation until you manage to get something that looks like "x = numbers". This then extends into things like substitution of variables, where if you have two equations and you can work one into an "x = numbers * y" then you can take that and plug it into all the times 'x' shows up in the second one to solve for an actual value of 'y', then turn around and punch it back into the equation you just used to get an actual value for 'x'.
You also learn some of the basics and terminology of graphs, what things like "asymptote" mean (an imaginary line on a graph which the graph approaches, but never quite touches) and what various graphs of functions actually look like on an x/y scale.
{do all formulas actually have a reason?}
Yes
I would like to say that a lot of formulas that we teach are actually simplified using much more complex forms of mathematics than the classes that they are taught in. For example most of the area/volume formulas we use (such as pi*r^2 for volume of a circle) actually use calculus in their derivations, despite being taught in classes like beginning geometry. In that sense there may come times when it might seem like a formula doesn't really have a good explanation behind it, be assured that there is an explanation there, it's just most likely using math that is above what you are learning (and thus makes it hard for books/teachers to explain them well). One of my favorite things once I got to calculus was finally being able to get good explanations for all the formulas I had just had to memorize before, since I could finally understand the math that was behind them.
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Topic: Okay round 2 with college kids worse nightmare! (Read 2868 times)