Math Refresher for Adults

You used to know this. Fractions, decimals, percentages: the steps can be learned again, one at a time, with every answer worked out.

A placement test, a course that starts next month, a child's worksheet at the kitchen table. This book is for adults who need their arithmetic back, often by a date. It is written for the weeks before a placement test, the first math unit of a course, or the next round of homework. There are no grade levels anywhere in it and no cartoons; the problems are about paychecks, bills, discounts, recipes, trips and hours on a shift.

It runs from whole numbers to the first steps of algebra, in the order the skills build on each other. Each of the 60 sessions teaches one skill, works an example before the first blank line, and then gives you twelve questions to practice on.

What's inside:

• A 30-question check to start. Three questions for each teaching chapter, then a map that tells you which chapters you need in full and which ask only for their Check-up. If you have a date, Your Plan counts the sittings the map asks for against the evenings you have, and lays out a shorter route when they fall short.
• Teaching before practice. Every session opens with a short explanation and one example worked all the way through. Fractions get three chapters and 18 sessions, with every step on its own line: adding with different bottoms, multiplying, dividing, mixed numbers.
• 880 exercises and 880 worked answers. Every answer shows its steps, not only the result: the column where a number was borrowed, the line where a percent became a decimal. When yours differs, you can find the line where the two parted company.
• Every worked answer recalculated by a program, line by line, before printing: every Practice, every Check-up, both 30-question checks, with fractions kept as fractions. It checks the arithmetic; the book says plainly that it cannot check the wording.
• The usual mistake, named. 60 of them, one per session, marked with a cross and shown where they go wrong. Nothing in the book is marked except by you.
• Ten teaching chapters, in order: whole numbers (two chapters), factors and multiples, fractions (three), decimals, percentages, ratio and proportion, first steps in algebra. Each ends with a ten-question Check-up.
• Room to write. In the paperback, 8.5 x 11 inches, every Practice question has space to work under it. The answers sit at the end of each chapter, out of sight while you work.
• The same check again. Chapter 12 asks thirty new questions on the same thirty skills, so you can set your score beside your first one. A progress log and a quick reference are at the back.

What it is not. It is not a children's book, and it is not for someone who already enjoys math and wants to be stretched. It stops at the first steps of algebra: inequalities, exponent rules, square roots, geometry and charts are not taught here, so if your test goes further, this book prepares its base and not the whole of it. The Kindle edition has the same content; work the questions on paper beside you, since the writing space is a feature of the paperback.

Take the thirty questions in Chapter 1 with a pencil. The map will tell you where to begin.