##### Vary and twist: Collecting like terms

Not sure how I feel about some of the decisions here. I’ve introduced a bit of index laws towards the end of the sheet. Is this madness? I thought I would add it to reinforce the difference between simplifying powers and simplifying regular expressions. Maybe it’s too much.

As usual here’s my little justification for the first 10 questions.

1. A simple one to start
2. If you change the letter, it’s the same process
3. You can have multiples of terms
4. And it doesn’t matter where in the expression they occur
5. You can have 3 terms
6. And it doesn’t matter where in the expression they occur
7. Introducing a negative for the first time. At the end to make it easier
8. But the negative can occur anywhere! Here it actually makes you use negatives unless you collect the terms first
9. Introducing terms like bc. It’s not the same as b + c
10. We can do some division

Later questions cover stuff like ab being the same as ba.

I quite like the last question

How often do we present students with expressions that can’t be simplified?