xiiiPreface
If you want to improve your understanding of algebra, then this book is for you. It can
supplement standard texts at the middle-school and high-school levels. It can also serve as a
self-teaching or home-schooling supplement. The essential prerequisite is a solid background
in arithmetic. It will help if you’ve had some pre-algebra as well.
This book contains three major sections. Part 1 involves numbers, sets, arithmetic opera-
tions, and basic equations. Part 2 is devoted to first-degree equations, relations, functions, and
systems of linear equations. Part 3 deals with quadratic, cubic, and higher-degree equations,
and introduces you to logarithms, exponentials, and systems of nonlinear equations.
Chapters 1 through 9, 11 through 19, and 21 through 29 end with practice exercises. You
may (and should) refer to the text as you solve these problems. Worked-out solutions appear
in Apps. A, B, and C. Often, these solutions do not represent the only way a problem can be
figured out. Feel free to try alternatives!
Chapters 10, 20, and 30 contain question-and-answer sets that finish up Parts 1, 2,
and 3, respectively. These chapters will help you review the material. A multiple-choice final
exam concludes the course. Don’t refer to the text while taking the exam. The questions in the
exam are more general (and less time consuming) than the practice exercises at the ends of the
chapters. The final exam is designed to test your grasp of the concepts, not to see how well you
can execute calculations. The correct answers are listed in App. D.
In my opinion, middle-school and high-school students aren’t sufficiently challenged in
mathematics these days. I think that most textbooks place too much importance on “churning
out answers,” and often fail to explain how and why you get those answers. I wrote this book
to address these problems. The presentation sometimes gets theoretical, but I’ve tried to intro-
duce the language gently so you won’t get lost in a wilderness of jargon. Many of the examples
and problems are easy, some take work, and a few are designed to make you think hard.
If you complete one chapter per week, you’ll get through this course in a school year. But don’t hurry.
Proceed at your own pace. When you’ve finished this book, I highly recommend McGraw-Hill’s Algebra
Demystified and College Algebra Demystified, both by Rhonda Huettenmueller, for further study.Stan GibiliscoCopyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Click here for terms of use.