You can describe math as just using numbers to solve problems. You can say that science is just about experiments, but how is math related to science? As you know, in science you have to experiment to find our things and write down the stuff you see. Sometimes you have to use charts to graph things. You would use a graph in radioactive dating to see how the number of something, say potassium decreased over time to find our how old it is. I saw that in science that the scientists were using formulas to find out something. 

That is related to math because in math, you use charts and graphs to graph data and see what the results are. In the periodic table, you see a lot of numbers on it. Those numbers are the atomic numbers. The periodic table also has other number like how much the element weighs and other stuff like that. Those are related to math because it tells you the weight of the element and the order of the periodic number. What I'm trying to say is that there are many similarities between math and science. 

Do you know what are negative numbers? Have you seen one? Negative numbers are numbers that are less than positive numbers. When you see a negative number, you will see a little dash on the side of the number. What that means is that the number is negative because it has the negative sign. You use negative numbers all the time when you are doing math. You will see negative numbers all the time in math. You will also see them in real life like in money or stocks.

Where do you see these negative numbers in real life? You usually see them when you owe someone money. Like if you owe the library money, the give you a paper the says how much money you owe and it has a number like this, -3.55. That negative means that you owe the library that much money. You also see them in stocks. When you see the news, you look at the stock market and see what is going on. When the stock is down, you will see a percentage that is negative like this, -0.66%. That means that the stock has lost .66 percent of its stock. 

How do you solve 2x-7=15? It's pretty easy, and you learn this in algebra. This is exactly a pirate problem. The first thing you would do is add 7 to 15 and -7. You get rid of -7, and you are left with 2x=22. The last thing you would do is divide by 2 to both sides. You also get rid of 2 and are left with x=11. So you're answer to this problem is x=11. Easy right. You just do the opposite of what they want you to do.

This problem is so easy. I learned this back in the first quarter of the school year. Mr.Erickson called these problems pirate problems because you are retracing your steps to find the x. I have done these problems before and I thought they were going to be hard at firs, but it turned out to be easy. I will tell you more about pirate problems and how to solve them. Like pirates, you retrace you steps to find the x. So for this problem, you would have to do the opposite of the operation signs. Instead of subtracting, you would add 7 and instead of multiplying by 2, you would divide by 2. Then you would see what x is at the end of the problem.