How do you translate "3 times the difference of a number and one" into a mathematical expression?

Question

14019 views around the world

You can reuse this answer
Creative Commons License

Answer 1 · 2015-12-11T05:15:28

$3(x-1)$

Since the expression is a DIFFERENCE, subtraction will be involved.

As an example, the difference of $7$ and $5$ would be written as $7-5$ .

Therefore, the difference of a number and one can be represented by the expression $x-1$ , where $x$ can be equal to any number.

If we want to find $3$ times that difference, we multiply $3$ by what we already have:

$3(x-1)$

Note that this is also equal to $3x-3$ if we distribute the $3$ .

Answer 2 · 2015-12-11T12:59:33

Depending on the context you could also have: $3(1-x)$