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Summary: This module provides sample problems which develop concepts related to radicals.
As a student of mine once said, “In real life, no one ever says ‘Here’s 100 dollars, what’s the square root of it?’” She’s right, of course—as far as I know, no one ever takes the square root of money. And she is asking exactly the right question, which is: why do we need roots anyway?
If a square is
Q. You call that real life?
A. OK, you asked for it…
A real estate developer is putting houses down on a plot of land that is 50 acres large. He wants to put down 100 houses, so each house will sit on a
A piano is dropped from a building 100 ft high. (“Dropped” implies that someone just let go of it, instead of throwing it—so it has no initial velocity.)
Convinced? Square roots come up all the time in real life, because squaring things comes up all the time in real life, and the square root is how you get back. So we’re going to have a unit on square roots.
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This work is licensed by Kenny M. Felder under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 2.0), and is an Open Educational Resource.
Last edited by Kenny M. Felder on Jan 9, 2009 6:21 am -0600.
"This is the "main" book in Kenny Felder's "Advanced Algebra II" series. This text was created with a focus on 'doing' and 'understanding' algebra concepts rather than simply hearing about them in […]"