Solving Inequalities

In this video we’re going to look at how to solve inequalities. You should already know what these 4 symbols mean. Inequalities are used throughout life. Anytime that there are a range of values possible, inequalities are involved rather than an equals sign. Like if you’re calculating the time to get somewhere, because your speed has to be less than the speed limit Or if you have a monthly budget, how much can you spend each day? We solve them in the exact same way as equations… in fact, just think of the inequality as you would an equals sign. Generally, we don’t touch the inequality… we just solve around it, and there will be no mistakes. The only thing to keep an eye out for is when we have negative x’s. I personally recommend that you move the ‘x’ to make it positive… so add x to both sides and solve from there. There is another option… imagine we’d started by moving the 3. We would have ended up with negative x. To make ‘x’ positive, we need to divide by the negative. When we divide by a negative, we also need to change the direction of the inequality. You just need to remember to change the direction of the inequality if you’re dividing by a negative. But we can just avoid this completely like we did in the first method, and focus on moving the ‘x’ to become positive earlier on. So that’s all there is to solving inequalities… you can pretty much just think of them as a normal equation with an equals sign. The only thing to be careful of, is if you’re dividing by a negative then the inequality changes direction. CREDITS Animation & Design: Bing Rijper Narration: Lucy Billings Script: Lucy Billings