Lesson 3

Interpreting Inequalities

Lesson Narrative

In this final lesson on inequalities, students explore situations in which some of the solutions to inequalities do not make sense in the situation’s context. Students learn to think carefully about a situation’s constraints when coming up with reasonable solutions to an inequality. Students also see that inequalities can represent a comparison of two or more unknown quantities.


Teacher Notes for IM 6–8 Math Accelerated
Disregard the note in the lesson narrative about this being the final lesson on inequalities. Students will continue their work with inequalities over 3 more lessons, shifting focus to inequalities of the form \(px+q>r\) or \(px+q<r\), where \(p\), \(q\), and \(r\) are specific rational numbers.

Learning Goals

Teacher Facing

  • Critique (orally and in writing) possible values given for a situation with more than one constraint, including whether fractional or negative values are reasonable.
  • Interpret unbalanced hanger diagrams (orally and in writing) and write inequality statements to represent relationships between the weights on an unbalanced hanger diagram.
  • Write and interpret inequality statements that include more than one variable.

Student Facing

Let’s examine what inequalities can tell us.

Learning Targets

Student Facing

  • I can explain what the solution to an inequality means in a situation.
  • I can write inequalities that involves more than one variable.

CCSS Standards

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