Exercise 24 Page 22

The key phrase is "less than" This indicates that we should subtract two things. ... - ...The two terms that are involved in the subtraction are: "15" and "the cube of a number," which means raising to the power of 3. Since "15" comes first in the verbal expression, it should be on the right-hand side of the addition. a number^3-15 The phrase "a number" is indicating an arbitrary number or a variable. If we call this number x, we can complete our expression. 15 less than the cube of a number x^3 - 15 Note that this is only one of multiple ways to algebraically express the given verbal expression.