The EquationQuest cast

Each friend shows you one idea by how they act. Meet them all and see how the ideas fit together.

1. Lever Maintaining balance — do the same thing to both sides Read the story →
2. Solo Isolating the variable — moving everything else away from x Read the story →
3. Undo Inverse operations — addition ↔ subtraction, multiplication ↔ division Read the story →
4. Spread Distribution — multiplying across parentheses Read the story →
5. Flipper The sign-flip in inequalities when multiplying/dividing by a negative Read the story →
6. Corral Combining like terms — you can only add or subtract terms of the same kind; gather the like ones together Read the story →
7. Leaven Exponents — repeated multiplication; the small raised number counts how many times Read the story →
8. Marshal Order of operations — the agreed sequence for working an expression (PEMDAS) Read the story →
9. Prise Factoring — find the part two or more terms share and pull it out front Read the story →
10. Stead Substitution — put a known value in place of a variable, then simplify Read the story →

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