OMG - I think my brain is going to explode. When did highschool math become so hard?! As you can see by the pic, there was much frustrations tonight!! The teacher is trying really hard to weed out the kids from his class. He told Liam that he should consider taking the college level math. I told Liam he's not changing classes. I'll help him through it. If he wants to get into a university he needs this class, so it kind of pisses me off that the teacher is doing this. Shouldn't he be teaching instead of intimidating??


Anyways, I think we solved that damn playground math question. It was solving for quadratic equations - solving by factoring... the answer is this:

Area of the playground presently = 60 x 40 = 2400 sq.meters

when doubled it becomes  4800 square meters
Let the increase in length and width be x meters

(60+x)(40+x)= 4800 (so your initial equation was correct!)

2400 +60x+40x +x^2= 4800 (this is how you expand it)

x^2+100x-2400=0 (you must have quadratic equals (zero) before you can solve)

x^2+120x-20x-2400=0 (this is where the factoring comes into play)

x(x+120)-20(x+120) =0 (the two bracketed is repeated, so we simplified)

(x-20)(x+120)=0 (I'm not sure what happens here but Liam seemed to figure it out to 20)

x= 20

The length and width must be increased by 20 meters.

Not sure if all my terminology is correct but whatever works. That only took 3 hours to solve. The other two hours I was doing trigonometry to figure out the height of a mountain with only 2 angles and one length... There were 21 questions and Liam figured out the other ones. We might have missed 3. 

It's late and we're all tired... going to bed now. Thanks for helping out! Nite nite...