Question

How do you express the phrase “25 decreased by a number v” as an algebraic expression?

Answer 1

Hint: First get the two numbers from the given phrase. “25 decreased by a number v” means the resulting value will be decreased by the value ‘v’ from the initial value ‘25’. So, to get the algebraic expression subtract the number ‘v’ from the given number ‘25’.

Complete step-by-step solution:
The given phrase we have, “25 decreased by a number v”
Here, we have two numbers ‘25’ and ‘v’ where the value of ‘v’ is unknown.
A number is decreased by another number means, the final value of that number will be less than that of another value and for that we have to perform subtraction operation.
So, subtracting ‘v’ from ‘25’, we get
\[25-v\]
Hence, the algebraic expression of the phrase “25 decreased by a number v” is \[25-v\].
This is the required solution of the given question.

Note: We can not get any numeric value of the algebraic expression as the value of ‘v’ is not given. We can understand this by taking a suitable example. Suppose the question was given that “25 decreased by a number 5” (‘5’ or any other constant instead of ‘v’), then we could get the result of algebraic expression as $25-5=20$.