E
quations and inequalities and systems thereof, made up of expressions in which the unknown quantity is
a variable that is raised only to the first power throughout, are said to be linear. Elementary arithmetic prop-
erties (e.g., the associative and distributive properties of addition and multiplication), properties of inequal-
ities, and the order of operations are used to solve them.
A graph of a line can be obtained using its slope and a point on the line; the same is true for linear inequal-
ities, with the additional step of shading the region on the appropriate side of the line that depicts the set of ordered
pairs satisfying the inequality. Systems are handled similarly, although there are more possibilities regarding the
final graphical representation of the solution. These topics are explored in the following 13 problem sets.