An expression is a series of integers, operations, and in some cases symbols that are piled together to create a value of some kind. Expressions do not have equal signs or inequalities. Expressions help us to better understand the world around us by stating problems that we can explore and mathematically determine the value or truth of. We can use mathematically expressions to model and describe real world situations. Especially when we have one or two unknown values. The first thing you need to do to describe this situation is determine what is the unknown variable in your situation. Once you have identified the unknown describe it as a variable and write a variable expression to describe the condition of the system that you are exploring. This is a skill that gets much easier as you take your time and practice it. It is a good idea to practice by just writing mathematically expressions to model math statements. An example of this would be writing an expression to model the sentence: 6 more than the product of 2 and a number. If we choose y as our unknown variable, we can write this as: 6 + (2 x y).
Expressions are basically mathematical phrases. A way to describe the world around us or math based situations that we come across. For example, what if you had a 16 inch piece of wood that is 2 inches too big for a corner piece of the deck. To express this mimetically we could write the expression 16 inches - 2 inches is our desired size or 16 - 2. These worksheets will help you learn how to model and solve situations just like this.