Question

How do you simplify `4a + 7 + 2a`?

Answer 1

`6a+7`

Explanation:

Consider money for a moment. I am English so I am going to use £

Suppose you had 4 lots of £5 notes in your wallet. You then added a further 2 lots of £5 notes. The total lots of £5 would be 4+2.

Ok, we are using the letter 'a' but the same principle applies.

So we have

`(4a+2a)+7`

This is the same as

`6a+7`

The actual value of `a` does not matter for this action. All you are doing is counting how many of `a` you have got.