Variable Definition

In this section, we learn the basic definition of a variable. What is a variable and how are variables used in math? When we first learn about variables, the concept can be a bit challenging. A variable is generally a letter that is used to represent an unknown quantity. Once we have discussed the variable definition, we learn some other terminology commonly used in Algebra 1. We will learn that a term is a single number, variable, or a combination of a number times one or many variables. We also discuss algebraic expressions. An algebraic expression is a single term, or multiple terms separated by "+" and/or "-" operations. We will cover how to evaluate an algebraic expression for a given value of the variable. Lastly, we will learn how to simplify an algebraic expression by combining like terms and using the distributive property.