Question

1) The eighth grade class has 20% fewer students this year than they

had as seventh graders. Write an expression to show the decline in
class numbers, and then simplify the expression. Use (s) to represent
the number of seventh grade students.

Answer 1

Explanation:

To represent the number of eighth-grade students, we can use the expression:

0.8s

This is because the problem states that there are 20% fewer students in the eighth grade than in the seventh grade, which means that the number of eighth-grade students is equal to 80% of the number of seventh-grade students.

To simplify this expression, we can use the distributive property:

0.8s = 1s - 0.2s

This shows that the number of eighth-grade students is equal to the number of seventh-grade students minus 20% of the number of seventh-grade students. We can further simplify this to:

0.8s = 0.8s

This means that the number of eighth-grade students is equal to 80% of the number of seventh-grade students, which is consistent with the original problem statement.