Lesson 2

Properties of Real Numbers and Order of Operations

Reading Assignment: Nustad and Wesner: Sections 1–3 and 1–4, pp. 24–28 and pp. 31–34.

Learning Objectives
After completing this lesson, you will be able to:

• recognize the properties of real numbers, by definition and in examples
• understand the addition and multiplication properties of equality, the zero
factor property and the double-negative property
• identify the terms of an algebraic expression and the coefficients of each term
• recognize like terms in an algebraic expression and employ the distributive
property to combine those like terms
• use the distributive property to remove grouping symbols in an algebraic
expression
• apply the correct order when simplifying expressions containing more then
one arithmetic operation