The Parts of Speech

Traditional grammar classifies words based on eight parts of speech: the verb, the noun, thepronoun, the adjective, the adverb, the preposition, the conjunction, and the interjection. Each part of speech explains not what the word is, but how the word is used. In fact, the same word can be a noun in one sentence and a verb or adjective in the next. The next few examples show how a word's part of speech can change from one sentence to the next, and following them is a series of sections on the individual parts of speech, followed by an exercise. Books are made of ink, paper, and glue. In this sentence, "books" is a noun, the subject of the sentence. Deborah waits patiently while Bridget books the tickets. Here "books" is a verb, and its subject is "Bridget." We walk down the street. In this sentence, "walk" is a verb, and its subject is the pronoun "we." The mail carrier stood on the walk. In this example, "walk" is a noun, which is part of a prepositional phrase describing where the mail carrier stood. The town decided to build a new jail. Here "jail" is a noun, which is the object of the infinitive phrase "to build." The sheriff told us that if we did not leave town immediately he would jail us. Here "jail" is part of the compound verb "would jail." They heard high pitched cries in the middle of the night. In this sentence, "cries" is a noun acting as the direct object of the verb "heard." The baby cries all night long and all day long. But here "cries" is a verb that describes the actions of the subject of the sentence, the baby. The next few sections explain each of the parts of speech in detail. When you have finished, you might want to test yourself by trying the exercise. Written by Heather MacFadyen

Parts of Speech Table

This is a summary of the 8 parts of speech*. You can find more detail if you click on each part of speech. part of speech function or "job" example words (to) be, have, do, like, work, sing, can, must pen, dog, work, music, town, London, teacher, John a/an, the, 2, some, good, big, red, well, interesting quickly, silently, well, badly, very, really I, you, he, she, some to, at, after, on, but and, but, when example sentences

Verb

action or state

EnglishClub.com is a web site. Ilike EnglishClub.com.

Noun

thing or person

This is my dog. He lives in myhouse. We live in London.

Adjective

describes a noun

I have two dogs. My dogs are big. I like big dogs.

Adverb

describes a verb, adjective or adverb replaces a noun links a noun to another word joins clauses or sentences or words short exclamation, sometimes inserted into a sentence

My dog eats quickly. When he isvery hungry, he eats reallyquickly. Tara is Indian. She is beautiful. We went to school on Monday. I like dogs and I like cats. I like cats and dogs. I like dogs but I don't like cats.

Pronoun Preposition

Conjunction

Interjection

oh!, ouch!, hi!, well

Ouch! That hurts! Hi! How are you? Well, I don't know.

* Some grammar sources categorize English into 9 or 10 parts of speech. At EnglishClub.com, we use the traditional categorization of 8 parts of speech. Examples of other categorizations are:

Verbs may be treated as two different parts of speech: o Lexical Verbs (work, like, run) o Auxiliary Verbs (be, have, must) Determiners may be treated as a separate part of speech, instead of being categorized under Adjectives

The history of algebra began in ancient Egypt and Babylon, where people learned to solve linear (ax = b) and quadratic (ax2 + bx = c) equations, as well as indeterminate equations such as x2 + y2 = z2, whereby several unknowns are involved. The ancient Babylonians solved arbitrary quadratic equations by essentially the same procedures taught today. They also could solve some indeterminate equations. The Alexandrian mathematicians Hero of Alexandria and Diophantus continued the traditions of Egypt and Babylon, but Diophantus's book Arithmetica is on a much higher level and gives many surprising solutions to difficult indeterminate equations. This ancient knowledge of solutions of equations in turn found a home early in the Islamic world, where it was known as the "science of restoration and balancing." (The Arabic word for restoration, al-jabru, is the root of the word algebra.) In the 9th century, the Arab mathematician al-Khwarizmi wrote one of the first Arabic algebras, a systematic expos of the basic theory of equations, with both examples and proofs. By the end of the 9th century, the Egyptian mathematician Abu Kamil had stated and proved the basic laws and identities of algebra and solved such complicated problems as finding x, y, and z such that x + y + z = 10, x2 + y2 = z2, and xz = y2. Ancient civilizations wrote out algebraic expressions using only occasional abbreviations, but by medieval times Islamic mathematicians were able to talk about arbitrarily high powers of the unknown x, and work out the basic algebra of polynomials (without yet using modern symbolism). This included the ability to multiply, divide, and find square roots of polynomials as well as a knowledge of the binomial theorem. The Persian mathematician, astronomer, and poet Omar Khayyam showed how to express roots of cubic equations by line segments obtained by intersecting conic sections, but he could not find a formula for the roots. A Latin translation of Al-Khwarizmi's Algebra appeared in the 12th century. In the early 13th century, the great Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci achieved a close approximation to the solution of the cubic equation x3 + 2x2 + cx = d. Because Fibonacci had traveled in Islamic lands, he probably used an Arabic method of successive approximations. Early in the 16th century, the Italian mathematicians Scipione del Ferro, Niccol Tartaglia, and Gerolamo Cardano solved the general cubic equation in terms of the constants appearing in the equation. Cardano's pupil, Ludovico Ferrari, soon found an exact solution to equations of the fourth degree (see quartic equation), and as a result, mathematicians for the next several centuries tried to find a formula for the roots of equations of degree five, or higher. Early in the 19th century, however, the Norwegian mathematician Niels Abel and the French mathematician Evariste Galois proved that no such formula

exists. An important development in algebra in the 16th century was the introduction of symbols for the unknown and for algebraic powers and operations. As a result of this development, Book III of La gometrie (1637), written by the French philosopher and mathematician Ren Descartes, looks much like a modern algebra text. Descartes's most significant contribution to mathematics, however, was his discovery of analytic geometry, which reduces the solution of geometric problems to the solution of algebraic ones. His geometry text also contained the essentials of a course on the theory of equations, including his so-called rule of signs for counting the number of what Descartes called the "true" (positive) and "false" (negative) roots of an equation. Work continued through the 18th century on the theory of equations, but not until 1799 was the proof published, by the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, showing that every polynomial equation has at least one root in the complex plane (see Number: Complex Numbers). By the time of Gauss, algebra had entered its modern phase. Attention shifted from solving polynomial equations to studying the structure of abstract mathematical systems whose axioms were based on the behavior of mathematical objects, such as complex numbers, that mathematicians encountered when studying polynomial equations. Two examples of such systems are algebraic groups (see Group) and quaternions, which share some of the properties of number systems but also depart from them in important ways. Groups began as systems of permutations and combinations of roots of polynomials, but they became one of the chief unifying concepts of 19th-century mathematics. Important contributions to their study were made by the French mathematicians Galois and Augustin Cauchy, the British mathematician Arthur Cayley, and the Norwegian mathematicians Niels Abel and Sophus Lie. Quaternions were discovered by British mathematician and astronomer William Rowan Hamilton, who extended the arithmetic of complex numbers to quaternions while complex numbers are of the form a + bi, quaternions are of the form a + bi + cj + dk. Immediately after Hamilton's discovery, the German mathematician Hermann Grassmann began investigating vectors. Despite its abstract character, American physicist J. W. Gibbs recognized in vector algebra a system of great utility for physicists, just as Hamilton had recognized the usefulness of quaternions. The widespread influence of this abstract approach led George Boole to write The Laws of Thought (1854), an algebraic treatment of basic logic. Since that time, modern algebraalso called abstract algebrahas continued to develop. Important new results have been discovered, and the subject has found applications in all branches of mathematics and in many of the sciences as well. Main page

*The origins of algebra go all the way back to the early Babylonians and Hindus. The Arabs (specifically the person described next) used and formalized algebra, giving it the name by which we now know it. The name is derived from the treatise written in about the year 830 AD by the Persian Muslim mathematician Muhammad bin Ms al-Khwrizm titled (in Arabic ) Al-Kitab alJabr wa-l-Muqabala (meaning "The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing"), which provided symbolic operations for the systematic solution of linear and quadratic equations. *Algebra (from Arabic al-jebr meaning "reunion of broken parts)

*By the time of Plato, Greek mathematics had undergone a drastic change. The Greeks created a geometric algebra where terms were represented by sides of geometric objects, usually lines, that had letters associated with them.[2] Diophantus (3rd century AD), sometimes called "the father of algebra", was an Alexandrian Greek mathematician and the author of a series of books called Arithmetica. These texts deal with solving algebraic equations.[3] While the word algebra comes from the Arabic language ( al-jabr "restoration") and much of its methods from Arabic/Islamic mathematics, its roots can be traced to earlier traditions, which had a direct influence on Muhammad ibn Ms al-Khwrizm (c. 780850). He later wrote The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing, which established algebra as a mathematical discipline that is independent of geometry and arithmetic.[4] The roots of algebra can be traced to the ancient Babylonians,[5] who developed an advanced arithmetical system with which they were able to do calculations in an algorithmic fashion. The Babylonians developed formulas to calculate solutions for problems typically solved today by using linear equations, quadratic equations, and indeterminate linear equations. By contrast, most Egyptians of this era, as well as Greek and Chinese mathematicians in the 1st millennium BC, usually solved such equations by geometric methods, such as those described in the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, Euclid's Elements, and The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art. The geometric work of the Greeks, typified in the Elements, provided the framework for generalizing formulae beyond the solution of particular problems into more general systems of stating and solving equations, though this would not be realized until the medieval Muslim mathematicians.[citation needed] The Hellenistic mathematicians Hero of Alexandria and Diophantus [6] as well as Indian mathematicians such as Brahmagupta continued the traditions of Egypt and Babylon, though Diophantus' Arithmetica and Brahmagupta's Brahmasphutasiddhanta are on a higher level.[7] For example, the first complete arithmetic solution (including zero and negative solutions) to quadratic equations was described by Brahmagupta in his book Brahmasphutasiddhanta. Later, Arabic and Muslim mathematicians developed algebraic methods to a much higher degree of sophistication. Although Diophantus and the Babylonians used mostly special ad hoc methods to solve equations, Al-Khwarizmi was the first to solve equations using general methods. He solved the linear indeterminate equations, quadratic equations, second order indeterminate equations and equations with multiple variables.[citation needed]

In 1545, the Italian mathematician Girolamo Cardano published Ars magna -The great art, a 40-chapter masterpiece in which he gave for the first time a method for solving the general quartic equation.

The Greek mathematician Diophantus has traditionally been known as the "father of algebra" but in more recent times there is much debate over whether al-Khwarizmi, who founded the discipline of al-jabr, deserves that title instead.[8] Those who support Diophantus point to the fact that the algebra found in Al-Jabr is slightly more elementary than the algebra found in Arithmetica and that Arithmetica is syncopated while Al-Jabr is fully rhetorical.[9] Those who support Al-Khwarizmi point to the fact that he introduced the methods of "reduction" and "balancing" (the transposition of subtracted terms to the other side of an equation, that is, the cancellation of like terms on opposite sides of the equation) which the term al-jabr originally referred to,[10] and that he gave an exhaustive explanation of solving quadratic equations,[11] supported by geometric proofs, while treating algebra as an independent discipline in its own right.[12] His algebra was also no longer concerned "with a series of problems to be resolved, but an exposition which starts with primitive terms in which the combinations must give all possible prototypes for equations, which henceforward explicitly constitute the true object of study." He also studied an equation for its own sake and "in a generic manner, insofar as it does not simply emerge in the course of solving a problem, but is specifically called on to define an infinite class of problems."[13] The Persian mathematician Omar Khayyam is credited with identifying the foundations of algebraic geometry and found the general geometric solution of the cubic equation. Another Persian mathematician, Sharaf al-Dn al-Ts, found algebraic and numerical solutions to various cases of cubic equations.[14] He also developed the concept of a function.[15] The Indian mathematicians Mahavira and Bhaskara II, the Persian mathematician Al-Karaji,[16] and the Chinese mathematician Zhu Shijie, solved various cases of cubic, quartic, quintic and higherorder polynomial equations using numerical methods. In the 13th century, the solution of a cubic equation by Fibonacci is representative of the beginning of a revival in European algebra. As the

Islamic world was declining, the European world was ascending. And it is here that algebra was further developed. Franois Vites work at the close of the 16th century marks the start of the classical discipline of algebra. In 1637, Ren Descartes published La Gomtrie, inventing analytic geometry and introducing modern algebraic notation. Another key event in the further development of algebra was the general algebraic solution of the cubic and quartic equations, developed in the mid-16th century. The idea of a determinant was developed by Japanese mathematician Kowa Seki in the 17th century, followed independently by Gottfried Leibniz ten years later, for the purpose of solving systems of simultaneous linear equations using matrices. Gabriel Cramer also did some work on matrices and determinants in the 18th century. Permutations were studied by Joseph Lagrange in his 1770 paper Rflexions sur la rsolution algbrique des quations devoted to solutions of algebraic equations, in which he introduced Lagrange resolvents. Paolo Ruffini was the first person to develop the theory of permutation groups, and like his predecessors, also in the context of solving algebraic equations. Abstract algebra was developed in the 19th century, initially focusing on what is now called Galois theory, and on constructibility issues.[17] The "modern algebra" has deep nineteenthcentury roots in the work, for example, of Richard Dedekind and Leopold Kronecker and profound interconnections with other branches of mathematics such as algebraic number theory and algebraic geometry.[18] George Peacock was the founder of axiomatic thinking in arithmetic and algebra. Augustus De Morgan discovered relation algebra in his Syllabus of a Proposed System of Logic. Josiah Willard Gibbs developed an algebra of vectors in three-dimensional space, and Arthur Cayley developed an algebra of matrices (this is a noncommutative algebra).[19]
*The word algebra is a Latin variant of the Arabic word al-jabr. This came from the title of a book, "Hidab al-jabr wal-muqubala", written in Baghdad about 825 A.D. by the Arab mathematician Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khowarizmi. The words jabr (JAH-ber) and muqubalah (moo-KAH-ba-lah) were used by al-Khowarizmi to designate two basic operations in solving equations. Jabr was to transpose subtracted terms to the other side of the equation. Muqubalah was to cancel like terms on opposite sides of the equation. In fact, the title has been translated to mean "science of restoration (or reunion) and opposition" or "science of transposition and cancellation" and "The Book of Completion and Cancellation" or "The Book of Restoration and Balancing." Jabr is used in the step where x - 2 = 12 becomes x = 14. The left-side of the first equation, where x is lessened by 2, is "restored" or "completed" back to x in the second equation. Muqabalah takes us from x + y = y + 7 to x = 7 by "cancelling" or "balancing" the two sides of the equation. Eventually the muqabalah was left behind, and this type of math became known as algebra in many languages. However, algebra was not invented by any single person or civilization. It is a reasoning skill that is most likely as old as human beings. The concept of algebra began as a reasoning skill to determine unknown quantities.

For example, an early human being (living nearly 7 million years ago) probably ran across the problem of food being stolen from him by other animals... He may have had 5 berries laying on the ground, but then, suddenly a bird flew by and now only had 2. He probably wondered how many berries the bird ate (an unknown quantity). He could probably reason that 3 berries were missing and thus 3 berries were eaten by the bird. If you perceive algebra in this way, then no one invented algebra because it is a natural instinct encoded in our genetics... it is our ability to reason out quantities that produce algebra. However, the elaboration of this reasoning into structured symbolization and manipulation is not credited to any single individual. Many people, throughout the world and throughout the ages, have developed parts of what is now known as ALGEBRA. The word itself -algebra- comes from a book called Kitab al-Jabr wa-l Muqabala (translated: Calculation by Way of Restoration and Confrontation or Calculation by Completion and Balance), written by Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Mosa al-Khwarizmi (approximately) in the year 820 AD. However, this was not the first written record of algebraic concepts or manipulation. Ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Indians, Chinese, and Greeks all have written records of algebra dating far before this date. No one can specify any one time, place, or person solely responsible for the elaboration of algebra as a mathematical discipline. However, it is true that the Acient Greeks invented "algebraic method" in which you solve a problem by calling a unknown in the question x, then list out all the other expressions containing x. Then you find two equal expressions and form a equation and solve it. *History of numbers. Numbers were probably first used many thousands of years ago in commerce, and initially only whole numbers and perhaps rational numbers were needed. But already in Babylonian times, practical problems of geometry began to require square roots. Nevertheless, for a very long time, and despite some development of algebra, only numbers that could somehow in principle be constructed mechanically were ever considered. The invention of fluxions by Isaac Newton in the late 1600s, however, introduced the idea of continuous variables - numbers with a continuous range of possible sizes. But while this was a convenient and powerful notion, it also involved a new level of abstraction, and it brought with it considerable confusion about fundamental issues. In fact, it was really only through the development of rigorous mathematical analysis in the late 1800s that this confusion finally began to clear up. And already by the 1880s Georg Cantor and others had constructed completely discontinuous functions, in which the idea of treating numbers as continuous variables where only the size matters was called into question. But until almost the 1970s, and the emergence of fractal geometry and chaos theory, these functions were largely considered as mathematical curiosities, of no practical relevance. (See also page 1175.) Independent of pure mathematics, however, practical applications of numbers have always had to go beyond the abstract idealization of continuous variables. For whether one does calculations by hand, by mechanical calculator or by electronic computer, one always needs an explicit representation for numbers, typically in terms of a sequence of digits of a certain length. (From the 1930s to 1960s, some work was done on so-called analog computers which used electrical voltages to represent continuous variables, but such machines turned out not to be reliable enough for most practical purposes.) From

the earliest days of electronic computing, however, great efforts were made to try to approximate a continuum of numbers as closely as possible. And indeed for studying systems with fairly simple behavior, such approximations can typically be made to work. But as we shall see later in this chapter, with more complex behavior, it is almost inevitable that the approximation breaks down, and there is no choice but to look at the explicit representations of numbers.

*algebra Diophantus al-Khwarismi Omar Khayyam Leonardo Fibnacci Scipione del Ferro+ Niccolo Tartaglia Gerolamo Cardano Niels Abel Evariste Galois Rene Descartes Carl Frriedrich Gauss Augustin Cauchy+ William Rowan Hamilton Hermann Grassmann George Bhoole

*trigo Thales, Democritus, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Archimedes, Euclid, Erastosthenes, Hipparchus

REAL NUMBERS

In mathematics, a real number is a value that represents a quantity along a continuous line. The real numbers include all the rational numbers, such as the integer 5 and the fraction 4/3, and all the irrational numbers such as 2 (1.41421356... the square root of two, an irrational algebraic number) and (3.14159265..., a transcendental number). Real numbers can be thought of as points on an infinitely long line called the number line or real line, where the points corresponding to integers are equally spaced. Any real number can be determined by a possibly infinite decimal representation such as that of 8.632, where each consecutive digit is measured in units one tenth the size of the previous one. The real line can be thought of as a part of the complex plane, and correspondingly, complex numbers include real numbers as a special case. These descriptions of the real numbers are not sufficiently rigorous by the modern standards of pure mathematics. The discovery of a suitably rigorous definition of the real numbers indeed, the realization that a better definition was needed was one of the most important developments of 19th century mathematics. The currently standard axiomatic definition is that real numbers form the unique complete totally ordered field (R,+,,<), up to isomorphism,[1]

Whereas popular constructive definitions of real numbers include declaring them as equivalence classes of Cauchy sequences of rational numbers, Dedekind cuts, or certain infinite "decimal representations", together with precise interpretations for the arithmetic operations and the order relation. These definitions are equivalent in the realm of classical mathematics. A real number may be either rational or irrational; either algebraic or transcendental; and either positive, negative, or zero. Real numbers are used to measure continuous quantities. They may in theory be expressed by decimal representations that have an infinite sequence of digits to the right of the decimal point; these are often represented in the same form as 324.823122147 The ellipsis (three dots) indicate that there would still be more digits to come. More formally, real numbers have the two basic properties of being an ordered field, and having the least upper bound property. The first says that real numbers comprise a field, with addition and multiplication as well as division by nonzero numbers, which can be totally ordered on a number line in a way compatible with addition and multiplication. The second says that if a nonempty set of real numbers has an upper bound, then it has a least upper bound. The second condition distinguishes the real numbers from the rational numbers: for example, the set of rational numbers whose square is less than 2 is a set with an upper bound (e.g. 1.5) but no least upper bound: hence the rational numbers do not satisfy the least upper bound property.
Natural Numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 numbers you count with positive (not zero) whole numbers Whole numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, the natural numbers, and also zero. No negatives; no fractions Integers -3,-2,-1, 0, 1, 2, 3, Whole numbers and their opposites Absolute value Distance a number is from zero Cant be negative Symbol | x | means the absolute value of x