Rational Expressions and Functions

Twelve goals last season. Fifteen home runs. Nine touchdowns. Whatever the statistics, sports analysts know it. Their jobs depend on it. Compiling and analyzing sports data not only help fans appreciate their teams but also help owners and coaches decide which players to recruit, how best to use them in games, how much they should be paid, and which players to trade. Understanding this kind of data requires a knowledge of specific types of expressions and functions. In this chapter, you will work with rational expressions and perform operations on them. You will use rational expressions and inequalities to solve real-world problems.

Sections

• Multiply and Divide Rational Expressions — determining values for which a rational expression is undefined, simplifying rational expressions, multiplying and dividing rational expressions, and multiplying and dividing rational functions.
• Add and Subtract Rational Expressions — adding and subtracting rational expressions with common and unlike denominators, and using rational functions.
• Simplify Complex Rational Expressions — simplifying complex rational expressions by simplifying the numerator and denominator or by multiplying by the least common denominator.
• Solve Rational Equations — solving rational equations and equations containing rational expressions.
• Solve Applications with Rational Equations — solving direct, inverse, and joint variation problems and applications involving rational equations.
• Solve Rational Inequalities — solving rational inequalities and writing their solutions in interval notation.

This chapter overview is adapted from Intermediate Algebra 2e, Chapter 7 Introduction by Lynn Marecek and Andrea Honeycutt Mathis, © OpenStax, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Access the original for free at openstax.org. Changes: condensed the chapter introduction and recast the chapter outline as a section list.