Lesson 3

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Have you ever played backgammon? Backgammon is a classic board game for two players consisting of a special board, checkers, and dice. The object of the game is to be the first to move all of your checkers from their starting positions on the board around a track, and then off the board. The first player to remove all of his or her checkers off the board wins the game.

Before a player can begin clearing pieces off the board, the player must move all of the pieces to his or her home board, which is a quadrant of the backgammon board. In the photo, the young man’s home board is the quadrant by his left arm, and the young woman’s home board is the quadrant by her knee. The majority of the game is spent moving pieces to the home board. Once all of a player’s pieces are in the home board, the game ends.

In this lesson you will determine the sums and differences of rational expressions. Just like in backgammon, you will discover that the actual adding and subtracting of expressions is easy—it’s the preparation of the expressions and meeting of certain conditions that can be a time challenge.