we're really excited to do this uh brandon and i have probably worked with each other for a couple of years now and from time to time we like to do these types of collaborations where we bring both of our audiences together everybody here is preparing for the tease and math is definitely a difficult subject uh brandon kraft is the guru of t smash so we're really excited to have him on the call today i'll give a quick introduction to myself and then we'll let brandon do an introduction uh i'm john wayne i'm the founder of smart edition academy along with my wife nurse melissa and we started smart edition academy about five years ago as melissa was coming out of nursing school and i had worked in test prep for almost 20 years and we kind of just put both our heads together and thought that we could help a lot of students prepare for their nursing school entrance exam so that's kind of where we are today five years later and we're just really excited to you know come as far as we have and our facebook group's got almost 12 000 people in it and we're helping over a hundred thousand people in the past five years and that's between our online course and our study guide book so we're just really happy to have everybody here and to be able to help everybody um and so that's it on my end uh brandon if you want to introduce yourself so most of you all know me as brandon craft i am a math instructor i've been teaching for over 15 years um i've also i started teaching high school and then i eventually got to the college level and that's where i've been for around 10 or 11 years teaching college level mathematics long story short back in 2015 uh when i was teaching at the college i'm currently working at i used to teach face-to-face math classes uh for the teas and the college i work at they eventually stopped doing that so i still had students coming to me asking me for tutoring asking me to make some videos and that's what actually led up to this moment uh never never in my uh math career would i have thought just making a few videos on youtube five or six years ago uh turning to something you know that's allowing me to work you know with john in florida uh y'all are all over the country it's it's a dream come true i love what i do um i mean if you want to read up a little bit about me my little bio underneath uh www.bcraftmath.com about me so i'm just a little bit more information about myself but i know you all are here for the tease uh so yeah i'm looking forward to working with you all today and however else we uh run into each other in the future cool awesome uh so glad to have you and the agenda for today is for just a few minutes i'm going to go over some of the changes with the t7 and really we're going to talk about the new question types so we're all familiar with multiple choice but we'll talk about these new question types and we'll go over a couple strategies and tips and we'll show you some examples of what these new question types look like and then we'll pass off to brandon who will work through a few of these new question types particularly relating to the math section we are all familiar with the the multiple choice questions and that's what's been on the t6 there are some advantages and disadvantages to multiple choice one of the big advantages are that there are multiple options that you can choose from which actually can make things easier easier to eliminate certain types of you know the answer options and in some of these new question types we don't have that option it's fill in the blank or ordering you know sequence type things where you have to drag and drop and all the answers are correct and you have to put them in the right order so it definitely throws in another level of difficulty into the test so we can get right into it um there's going to be four new types of questions and that is select all that apply fill in the blank ordered response or that drag and drop into a sequence of events type question and a hot spot question so let's go ahead and go through all of these and again if you guys have questions feel free to put it in the chat and i can stop and kind of answer anything that you might want to know more about so we'll start with the select all that apply i select all that apply is going to be a question and you're going to have anywhere between four to seven answer options most likely you'll see something more like five answer options but it could be as many as four and as many as seven and as few as four now this is a really infamous question type on the nclex and what we're starting to see is the nclex and the teas coming a little bit closer together at least in terms of the question types nothing to do with the content content is absolutely totally different from what's on the t said the nclex so don't let that worry you too much but these new question types are kind of starting to creep up now unfortunately with the select all that apply questions there is no partial credit for getting some of the questions correct and some incorrect you have to get all of them correct now i will show you just a quick example of what a select all that apply question looks like i put together this little test bank for brandon and i to work from today but this is going to be a select all that apply i mean it's pretty self-explanatory in this example we're going to answer what is true regarding the urinary system so kidneys make urine as a person ages kidney tissues and filtration capacity increases kidney helps regulate water balance and you would select the answers that you think are correct and i can check that i'm sure i will uh have this wrong and so you can see you know if you don't get them all correct the answer will be incorrect so you can read through this answer explanation and kind of get an idea of why those answers were right and wrong another example of a select all that apply question that you will see is in the english and language usage section and this is kind of around spelling so this would have a statement a question and it will say something like which which of the following words are misspelled in the sentence above and it would be scientists or environment beautiful believe noticeable um and i want to say here actually i think until we'd be able to see that there so this is the select all that apply question now let's talk about some strategies for this question type so this one's really interesting uh in the way that you should be approaching it and i think we just kind of went over this the different types of questions that you'll see um but the best way to approach these select all that applied questions is to not look at the question as one question it's really like four to seven individual questions with each answer option so you want to turn them into true false statements and if you're doing that you're able to break them down one by one going through the list and answer the questions that way so it does make this type of question a little bit more difficult because it's not just one question it's really like five questions in one so that's the best way to do do it just look at each one and turn it into a true false statement and answer the question that way the one thing you can do is you can try to link your answers that are very close to each other so if you're seeing on the select all that apply you know two or three of these are like very similar uh or two of these are very different they they have nothing to do with the question you can kind of you know make sure you eliminate those two questions or if you're seeing two or three that you know are very close together you can try and kind of link those questions and conversely just make sure that you're not selecting totally conflicting answer options you know you're on the wrong track if you're if you're picking two things that are totally conflicting always usually with these select all that apply questions time is really of the essence here so always go with your first response once you finish that question try not to go back after you leave the question it wastes some of that precious time that you have and more often than not it ends up being the wrong answer that's typically just what statistic statistics show when you go back second guess yourself you waste that time and you might end up being wrong another thing to look out for on the select all that apply questions is words like always or never those are such finite absolute words and things are rarely black and white like that or or very constant things more often than not things are always changing so those are actually wording in questions that can be in there to throw you off so always and never watch out for those kinds of words because they're typically not going to be one of the correct answers another strategy is make sure that your answer options relate to what's being asked and we're probably going to mention this i'm going to mention this on all of these alternative question types always make sure that you understand what the question is asking this is particularly helpful for math um and because you will see some true statements but it doesn't actually have to do with the question being asked and so you're kind of getting tricked in that way so just always make sure that the answer option relates to the question and then the best thing you can do for the select all that apply question to get better at them is to practice as many as you can as often as you can and just that practice and repetition just like with math will help you guys get better at these select all that apply questions and smart edition academy and brandon we are continually adding these select all and apply questions and uh even as we get more feedback from our students taking the test we'll you know add more of these questions and make them as good as we can and so the last one is that it is okay to take a little bit longer on the select all that apply again because unlike one multiple choice question uh that's only one question there's five questions here so you want to make sure that you take your time it's okay to do it here because it really if you look at it that way you're answering several questions especially turning them into proof ball statements um and then the last thing would be that it is not impossible but it's very rare that it will never be all the that it will be all the choices or i'm sorry that it will be one choice or all of the choices not to say that it couldn't happen but if you're just selecting one and thinking that that's and you don't really know that's probably not going to be correct and it's not usually going to be all of them also not to say you couldn't in absolute terms never say never but most likely it's not going to be one or all so the next question type is the supply the answer or the fill in the blank and we will see this on the math section a lot this is one of the questions that we have seen before and you can almost guaranteed to get on the math section so select all that apply uh you know i'm sorry fill in the blank this is pretty self-explanatory uh now generally fill in the blank questions are not the most difficult questions you'll see in terms of like how difficult the math is but they can be a lot harder because you don't have multiple answer choices to guess at or eliminate answer choices so you really have to get the answer right on the first time so that can make it difficult you will see fill in the blank questions on math section with math in it but also on the reading section and and you know again it's going to revolve around pretty basic math they're not throwing the toughest math at you here but for the reading section where you do have to do some math they're really testing you for your reading comprehension skills so that you can read whatever sentence it is and pull out the relevant information do your calculations in that way not you know get sidetracked by other words or sentences in the in the fill in the blank blank problem on the reading section so that's really what it's testing you for it's not so much about the math although you will need to do some basic math it's more about those reading comprehension skills now some strategies tips and strategies for filling the blank time is crucial on the test so you want to be as fast as possible but with these questions it's definitely worth double checking your work on because you have to get it right the first time and if you're going to do your math calculations twice this would be the type of question to do it on and you want to make sure you read the question very quick very carefully but specifically for how they want you to answer the question and i'll show an example here in a second but it will say when you answer this question to include a dollar sign or not do not include commas do it in this exact format round to the nearest cent it's what you don't want to do is have the right answer and end it and enter it in wrong and get it incorrect even though you have the right numbers you didn't put it in the right format so let's just take a quick look at what those kind of specific format things can be um so here would just be kind of a word problem uh asking you to do a calculation but then we'll see here round to the nearest dollar do not include a dollar sign a comma or a decimal point so that's very important when you're doing this um here fill in the blank and round the number to the nearest cent you know round the number to the nearest end so it's very important to pay attention to that and to enter it in here correctly and i'll mention this in another uh in just a second but another tip is to not look at the size of the answer boxes where you enter in your answer and think that that has anything to do with the answer so that if you've got a few decimal places or something but this box is small don't second-guess yourself and say the box is small the answer must be short or if we look here the box is really big my two-digit answer well maybe it should be three or four because the box is really big don't get caught up in that kind of a mistake the actual size of the answer box does not have anything to do with the question um all right so the next question type is ordered response and this is sort of a drag-and-drop type question where uh the question will give you several answer options and require you to drag and drop them into the correct place in the correct order you'll have some answer options on the left side you drag them into the right side now this is also a difficult question type because all of the options are correct there's no incorrect answers so instead of simply picking one answer choice you must consider multiple true statements and then organize them appropriately so that can definitely make this uh question type challenging a few examples of ordering questions that you'll see on math you would see ordering numbers from least to greatest or ascending to descending order on english the correct order of the writing process and those steps in in writing science you might see like logical ordering of events to show a cause-and-effect relationship so you so you show the first event and then all the effects you know thereafter of the you know four or five options again in science you might see something like arrange the steps that outline how the urinary system works or how blood flows through the heart so you know this stuff it's stuff that you'll know it's just asking you to demonstrate your knowledge of that in a different way the kind of drag and drop questions here so in this case this is actually to do at least to greatest by dragging the numbers into the boxes in the correct order so brandon will go over a few of these types of problems um but in this case a lot of times the easiest thing to do is convert these into fractions and then go ahead and drag your answers into the correct box like this and again you know can be a challenging question so um and here you'll see we kind of talk about um turning these into fractions um so that's an example there and this would just kind of be another example [Music] of a similar tech question and brandon will work these out and we'll make sure that the everybody in the facebook groups can see that before you get started on that all right cool now the last question type is a hotspot question and this is a question where you will have four images or kind of diagrams and it'll ask you a question and they're kind of set up a little bit differently from the graphic typical graphic questions because you'll actually have to click on the image to answer the question so it won't be like a map and it would ask you what the most northern point is on a map and you can click on like one of four spots to get the correct answer so a couple strategies tips for these hotspot questions are just really take your time look carefully at each clickable area within the question and the image that you're being asked to click on take the time to look at each option before clicking the one that you think is correct you don't want to miss anything so you don't want to thinking that you didn't have another option that you did because you just went too fast so you glance over the image too quickly and really these are just multiple choice questions so you're going to have that image you're going to have four options so it's essentially the same as any other multiple choice question it's just having you also look at an image while you're doing it and clicking on that image so those are the four new types of alternative questions that are on the tees um they're definitely adding a little kink it's not as easy as the multiple choice so for that reason these can be a little bit more difficult in terms of the rest of the test definitely i've heard a lot of people say they think that the t7 is more difficult but i think it can be debatable based on the actual subjects and topics because they're exactly the same and brandon can even speak to this in math they're really exactly the same they didn't add any new topics for things like science it just kind of depends on the students where you have less amp but more chemistry now for one student who you know took a p one and two so far for prerequisites but has not taken chemistry they're gonna wish they had more a p questions other people are totally um overwhelmed by how much amp is on the test so the fact that there's almost half the amount of amp that's a godsend for them they're very happy about that and depending if you're good or not at chemistry can you know depend on how you look at the test being more difficult or not but absolutely the same subjects and topics so it's not difficult more difficult for that reason but these new question types because they're not all multiple choice and you can eliminate all your answers it can seem a little bit more difficult we do want to talk about these new question types and yes this still applies to the t6 even though the t6 is multiple choice all right so um this is from smart editions and this is the new drag and drop put them in order but y'all if you're taking the t6 you're still going to have to pick multiple choice answers for questions that are asking you to put numbers in a certain order so what i'll do here is i'm just going to take this problem and i'm going to throw it on over into my little thing here i'll share these notes with you all over in the facebook group when i'm done today but this is t6 and t7 we want to put these numbers from greatest to least and john mentioned earlier take these fractions or even if you have percents convert them to decimals and use your calculator i am going to cover several calculator tips with you all today um just be careful with the negatives here so all we're going to do for a fraction to convert it to a decimal take the top number for example negative 5 tenths that's going to be a half but if you take 5 divided by 10 you get 0.5 so i want to think of this as negative 50 cents think about money so i'm going to put a little dollar symbol there and i added an extra zero no big deal there you can add as many zeros as you want to the end of a decimal and if i just press equals notice that it is still 0.5 so this one here is no need to convert this to a decimal it already is and this is actually somewhere around roughly 13 cents honestly you can think hey or not not 13 cents this is around a penny roughly around a penny because that two tells that one to stay the same roughly one cents and that could be enough to just get us by on that uh 16 divided by 36 some of these will have long decimals as you can see right there so 16 divided by 36 this is approximately 44 cents continuing on negative 5 divided by 9 we take that five divide it by nine and this if you technically round this if you technically round this to the nearest penny this is going to be approximately negative 56 cents i know you see a bunch of fives but if technically if you round to the nearest cent which is what computers do all the time when you're checking out groceries or if you're buying uh a dinner or whatever that hundredths place the nearest cent is always rounded so that's roughly negative 56 cents and then this one right here five divided by eight we get .625 and if you round that to the nearest cent we get somewhere around approximately 63 cents so you know even though we're talking about fractions and decimals and all that stuff i mean look we're talking about rounding as well if you have to round something to the nearest cent two decimal places so now let's just make sure we don't mess this up let's go greatest to least so we definitely don't want to pick any of these negative ones and if we look 63 cents unless i messed up somewhere 63 cents appears to be the biggest one so therefore 5 8 is the greatest the next one is going to be the 44 cents so that's going to be the 16 over 36. keep on going let's see uh now oh how about a penny we got that one cents right there so that is that 0.0 and now be careful with your negative numbers y'all uh the negative numbers think about negative money i mean listen to this would you rather be negative one hundred dollars in your bank account or just negative one dollar heaven forbid we're ever negative in our bank account but uh negative 100 is a lot less than negative 1. negative 100 that's less that is smaller than negative 1. so technically negative 50 cents is going to be the one there all right now uh let's see we only have one left and this is going to be the smallest one the negative 56 cents there is no dollar amount and i should have wrote that as negative 5 over 10 just to stay consistent with the way it was given thinking about money be careful with the negative numbers the more negative a number is the smaller it is and think about money that's the best way i can explain that to you so even though you know we have to actually drag and drop these so let me just shoot that guy over here and shoot this one over here uh greatest to least i'm just going to go ahead and drag these this is uh from smart edition again so dragging that down and i'm just going to keep on going and and you know with this it kind of goes without mentioning with this drag and drop and hot spots y'all these tests are no longer going to be paper based i mean that's the only way you're going to be able to drag stuff so um checking that one and and that's instant feedback over at smart edition so this is one of the new test question types drag and drop i'm going to give you a minute in 30 seconds this is fill in the blank and treat this feel free to come in on the facebook group chat the google me chat a minute and 30 seconds i'll be back i want to see what answers y'all get you guys all want you can post your answers in the chat message and we'll all kind of see what everybody's coming up with look at us all right so i did see some answers coming in over on google meet uh perfect eating it up with the 912 and 912 is right fill in the blank what you want to leave off i'm gonna go ahead and show that to you i'm still gonna work this out with you all but notice it does say round to the nearest dollar do not include a dollar sign a comma nor decimal so basically just the digits nine one two since a lot of us are saying that's the answer check it out it is correct um notice over at smart edition and as well as the resources i'm going to show you that i have you do get explanations as well if you do get an answer right or wrong but um let's work this one out there's a lot of uh i guess you could say filler or distractors when it comes to some word problems obviously a phone number does not matter even though we see numbers and here we have to pay attention to the days assuming you read the problem tuesday wednesday thursday and friday so there's four days a week and from 10 a.m to 6 p.m so let's look at that four days and each of those four days from 10 a.m to 6 p.m there's eight hour shifts now the hourly rate is going to be 14.20 and be careful we want to figure out the gross pay in two weeks not one week but two weeks so this is really just a long multiplication problem in all honesty um i mean there's so it doesn't matter what order you multiply y'all multiplication does not matter which way you multiply uh let's just take the four days if you work four days and you work eight hours each shift times eight that's going to be 32 hours per week i'm gonna go ahead and double that since the question says two weeks so that's a total of 64 hours so this is the total number of hours four days a week eight hours each day for two weeks 64 hours and the hourly rate is going to be 14.25 so you can multiply by 1425 and we do get that 912. again it does not matter what order you technically multiplied here it does not matter you'll be totally fine with that as a matter of fact you could do all this at one time i mean i can take it totally random we can take the 14 25 we can multiply that by eight hours times four days a week times two weeks we still get nine twelve multiplication it does not matter what order you multiply so um feel free to let's see 456 by two and yes so there's definitely more than one way to do this uh and math problems that's always the case pretty much there's definitely more than one way to solve the problem all right so that is our two examples from smart edition uh the uh drag and drop or rearrange as well as fill in the blank and now the uh math review i've just made a small t7 sample i'm gonna work out two of these from here uh now i haven't really heard let me just a little bit bigger so y'all can see that check all that apply even if this does not pop up on the t7 like check all that apply i think it's still worth knowing because essentially like john mentioned earlier when you're checking all that apply consider it a different example for each one technically we got six different things read the question carefully it says which statements are true and i'm just going to shoot that over here again i will share these notes with everybody and um yeah try take a minute and a half um and i guess a way you could leave the answer you could say you know we'll call this the we'll call this a b c d e and f feel free to type in the letters for the ones that are true i'll be back in a minute and a half all right so we did have a few answers coming in as well uh let's look at all so again treat each one as its own separate example this kind of goes back to where we were converting things to decimals thinking about money think of decimals as the most common form of a number that we deal with probably from day to day life decimal forms of numbers when we deal with money that's decimal form so we have fractions we have decimals and we have percents so uh this one right here if we think of this in terms of money this would be negative five dollars and pac-man this means greater than think about it like a pac-man or an alligator and you want that mouth to be eating the bigger number for it to be true so is negative five dollars greater than negative five dollars and ten cents and remember i mentioned earlier about the negative numbers the negative numbers the more negative a number is the smaller it is so yes negative five dollars is greater than that's what that inequality means negative five dollars and 10 cents so this one is true let's move on along if you don't have decimals like 82 percent now folks two ways we can do this you can either take your percentage 82 percent you can divide it by 100. this is a way that you can always convert a percent to a decimal take your percentage divided by 100 and some of y'all probably have heard of moving the decimal two places to the left d2p is something that i've used in my videos so therefore 82 percent i'm going to think of that as 82 cents is this greater than or equal to that little line right there greater than or equal to and let's take 41 divided by 50 check it out we get the same exact thing so sure it's not greater than but it is equal to so this is still a true statement because of that little itty-bitty line right there had that line not been there it would have been false now very similar for the next one here seven divided by two that's going to give you three dollars and fifty cents if you take seven dollars and you break it up into two piles that's going to be three dollars and 50 cents is that greater than 250 percent you need to convert your percent to a decimal that way we can compare all of these numbers so again just to rehash on that take your percentage divide by 100 that's how you always convert a percent to a decimal so that's two dollars and fifty cents so right now these first three are all true now let's look at these other ones negative twenty bucks no that is not less than negative one hundred dollars negative twenty dollars is actually bigger so this one is false uh let me just show you this one real quick two point five percent if we convert this two point five percent is going to be zero 0.025 2.5 percent divided by 100 and and let's think about this what is that round off to roughly that rounds off to roughly 3 cents if you round to the nearest penny and that is not less than 0.0025 that's not even a penny y'all this right here that's not even a penny because you got two zeros right there so this one is false as well and then last but not least seven over nine if we divide this one let me change my color seven divided by nine you're going to get .77777 which is roughly 78 cents and no that is not greater than 80 cents adding that extra zero there so this one is false as well so it you know if you haven't messed with fractions decimals and percents you need to know this t6 t7t is 100 i don't care knowing how to convert between fractions and decimals and percents is going to be crucial now feel free to come in on the chat with any questions we're going to go ahead and move on we got one more problem that i want to do today so we oh well actually let me check these and show you all the feedback so this is from my math review you can access this from the quizzes tab i'm checking those i'm gonna click check it does say we got these three right and notice look at my feedback try converting all the problems to decimal form and think about money it's exactly what i was just talking about so um the rest of these you know those right there those are the ones we said uh are true and the rest of them are false so let's do one more and let's try this one out so a minute and 30 seconds this is one more example and i'll be right back all right so this is our last example but again if you have time please uh stick around because i am going to show you a few calculator shortcuts i'm going to talk about that in detail right here in a moment i did see some answers coming in 20 is the correct answer let's go ahead i think it is let's go verify that so if we type in 20 we press check and notice that is correct there's an explanation there and now let me show you how to work this out so these are some conversions and a lot of times i hear questions from students what conversions do i need to know i think it is i think you do need to know that 12 inches is equal to 1 foot even though we will not use this one in this problem 3 feet equals 1 yard if you know those two i don't think they're going to ask you to remember feet to miles um but those two conversions i would definitely say are are good to know since i'm on this roll here 16 ounces equals one pound obviously that does not matter for this problem but that is a conversion that i would recommend that you know as well um and and for more of those we can talk about that over in the facebook groups but those are three conversions that i am kind of hearing people saying hey i had some type of problem that dealt with pounds or ounces or feet or inches or yards so what you have to recognize here is that the car each car is 2.25 inches inches long and then this train of cars that jackson is lining up he's lining up a train of matchbox cars that train is 3.75 feet long here's the fastest way to do this the fastest way to do it in my opinion is to take those feet since that's 3.75 feet you can always multiply feet by 12 to convert to inches three 3.75 times 12 that's 45 inches now why did i do this before you can start dealing with units units of measurement in most cases 9 out of 10 problems with units of measurement before you can do math with them they have to match and we can't match up feet with inches unless we convert one to the other but now that we have this long train that's 3.75 feet which is the same thing as 45 inches well since this is inches let's just divide it by how long one car is if you think about this 3.75 feet 45 inches it's going to take quite a few cars because each car is only 2.25 inches that's about shorter than your index finger maybe about the length that's a little bit longer than your pinky finger imagine that so let's divide that's what we're doing here we're going to take that 45 inches and we're going to divide it up into 2.25 inches and we do get 20. notice right there so we get 20 cars so those are the four examples um i mean obviously we're not covering everything there's some geometry there's more percentage based problems now what i do want to show you before we go is i do want to show you some calculator tips that they do work they do work on the on-screen calculator when you're taking now this calculator over here this obviously does not look like the teas test calculator but the button layout is pretty daggone similar as a matter of fact um i mean you can google t's calculator and you'll find uh pictures online i mean here's just one that's the actual on-screen calculator that uh ati has now this is what i tell everybody i mean yeah you can figure out how to use these buttons if you want to i don't mess with them i've been messing with calculators all my life and i always just overlook or don't even mess with the m buttons now the other buttons as you can notice if you look at everything else up here i have my calculator layout over here the same notice the percent the clears the backspace everything else is the same and if you didn't know this down here to the right of the decimal you have this little check on the t's calculator and that is the square root button on the teas test so um in no particular order since i just mentioned square root i'm going to show you how to do the square root on the t's calculator let's talk about square roots the square root of 25 is equal to five you don't divide it by two when you find the square root of something you are finding a number that you can multiply times itself so here's how you do it on the t's test if you have to take the square root which is likely you'll have at least one example type in the number first then press the square root button and you may have to press equals on the t's test calculator mine just automatically spits it out but that's a quick way that you can test to make sure that you're doing it right when you grab the t's calculator just say okay i'm gonna check 25 square root you better get five so with that said we can now do funky problems like the square root of 50. the square root of 50 is not 25. as a matter of fact it's going to be a little bit bigger than 7 if you think about it because 7 times 7 is 49. so we got to go a little bit bigger than 7 times 7 because 49 is just below 50. let's type it in type your number first bang on that square root button and as you can see here it is just a little bit bigger than seven any questions about the square root button i'm gonna try to monitor these comments the best i can sorry if i'm missing some no there's nothing there i'll let you know brandon all right rock and roll so that's the square root button now here okay the the percent key the percent key if a now the teas calculator does have one um some calculators don't have a percent button always remember that you can technically convert a percent to a decimal by dividing by 100. so 25 for example is 25 over 100 and that's going to be 0.25 so it's kind of like you got your fraction you have your decimal you have your percent well let me get that back so 25 over 100 and 0.25 when you're dealing with sales tax um let me just make up an example and then i'm gonna shut up i'm gonna be done uh let's suppose suppose your grocery bill was 131.97 cents which includes the tax of let's see well let's go with six percent oh your grocery bill 131.97 but this includes the tax so my question would be what was your subtotal basically this means what was the price of the groceries before tax that's what subtotal means so what i want to show you here now if this was a fill in the blank you don't have multiple choice questions to go off of but i'm going to go ahead and i just want to show y'all how we can quickly do this if this was multiple choice so let's suppose we had a b c and d and i'm just going to write down some random numbers let's suppose we had uh 124 dollars let's suppose we had 124 dollars and 50 cents let's suppose we had uh let me do [Music] um and then minus 131.9 so i'm just making this up on the fly let's suppose it was 120 405 and then last but not least let's suppose we had uh 121 dollars what you can do what you don't want to do is this y'all i see 124 dollars and five cents coming in what you're doing there is you're you're multiplying the six percent by the price which already includes the tax and that's not what we want to do here you actually want to take the subtotal this is how tax is computed y'all you take the subtotal you take the price before tax look at this 124.50 if we take 124 dollars and 50 cents and you multiply it by 6 you are finding the tax that is on the price before tax and that's what you want to do here so watch this if i take 124.50 and we find six percent of that which is .06 we get seven dollars and 47 cents you don't multiply the sales tax percentage by the total price of the groceries if that includes tax that's not how it's done you multiply six percent or whatever the sales sales tax rate is by the subtotal the price before tax now check out what happens if we take the 120 450 and we add on that sales tax so i'm just going to take the 747 add on the 124.50 and here we do get 131.97 so it's not 120 405. i could see why you'd want to pick that but again you don't want to find six percent of this price because that price already includes the tax that's the tricky part there now what does this have to do with a shortcut on the t's calculator well watch this now some calculators with a percent button don't do this but the t's calculator does i promise what we can do if it's multiple choice watch what i'm going to do here on the t's calculator type in that subtotal and again not all calculators do this so don't get mad if you're doing it on another calculator with a percent button and it don't work i'm here to tell you it will work on the t's calculator all we have to do is add and i'm going to type in six percent and look at what it does this does not work on all calculators with a percent button it works on this one and it works on the teas test what the calculator is doing in the background is this taking that 124.50 let me copy this over and make it bigger what it's doing in the background is it's taking this calculator here in the t's calculator it's taking six percent of whatever this number is and it's going to add it to it to give you that so that is a fast way without you having to do two separate steps you don't have to find six percent first and then add it on though you can always do that still that works on any calculator i don't care what you're dealing with you can always do it the way i did it here now what if this was fill in the blank uh and i think iphones do that as well a mccoy mentioned that over in google me i think that is correct i think iphones do yes all right so i said i was gonna shut up but i mean people are asking uh what if this is filling the blank now y'all i i'd i could get into a 20 minute conversation about this and i'm not going to do that but here's what you got to think about you take the subtotal plus the tax and this is going to be equal to the i guess you could say the grand total i'm just going to call it the total technically the word total means the subtotal and the tax together so let's act like we didn't know these answer choices let's add like it was fill in the blame we don't know the subtotal we don't have these answer choices well i'm gonna put an x for that i don't know what the subtotal is uh sure we do it's right there but let's act like we don't plus sales tax how did we find this sales tax up here how did we do that y'all we found six percent of the subtotal that is how you find sales tax this is how you find tips this is how you find discounts six percent of the subtotal here's what that looks like algebraically six percent don't write don't leave it like that because it's not just six cents y'all it's six percent of that subtotal that we don't know so that's why i'm gonna put an x right there i know that throws people for a loop but that's how you whoops that is how you find sales tax the percentage six percent times that x value which was that subtotal now we can come in here and set this equal to 130 197 and to kind of end things here uh i'm tying in some algebra combining like terms this is an understood one so if we combine like terms we get 1.06 x is equal to 131.97 and last but not least to solve this equation you need to brush up on equations as well i know we didn't do a lot today but you definitely want to know how to solve these let's take that 131.97 let's divide by 1.06 and there's that 120 450 yet again so multiple approaches multiple choice fill in the blank all that good stuff um i hope you found this helpful awesome thank you brandon yes sir that was super helpful and guys put it in the comments if you found that helpful um we'll we'll try and do you know more of these types of sessions uh periodically but uh this should be it hopefully that's going to be a little helpful to in kind of getting your mind wrapped around these new question types and how it relates to the math problems and a little bit of helpful tips and strategies on using the calculator a couple shortcuts there that are super helpful