When Form 5495 Distribute 2017-2024

Hi, I'm Rob. Welcome to Math Antics. In this lesson, we're going to talk about the distributive property, which is a really useful tool in algebra. If you watched our video called "The Distributive Property and Arithmetic," then you already know the basics of how the distributive property works. The key idea is that the distributive property allows you to take a factor and distribute it to each member of a group of things that are being added or subtracted. Instead of multiplying the factor by the entire group as a whole, you can distribute it to be multiplied by each member of the group individually. In the previous video, we saw how you can take a problem like 3 times the group 4 plus 6 and simplify it two different ways. You could either simplify what was in the group first or you could use the distributive property to distribute a copy of the factor 3 to each member of the group. No matter which way you go, you get the same answer. But in algebra, things are a little more complicated because we aren't just working with known numbers. Algebra involves unknown values and variables. So in algebra, you might have an expression like this: 3 times the group X plus 6. In this expression, we don't know what value X is. It could be 4 like in the last expression, but it doesn't have to be. It could be any number at all. And since we don't know what it is, that means we can't simplify the group first. In this case, our only option here is to either leave the expression just like it is and not simplify it at all, or to use the distributive property to eliminate the group. Just like in the arithmetic...