Intermediate Algebra 8th Edition

by Margaret L. Lial, John Hornsby, Terry McGinnis

The eighth edition of Intermediate Algebra continues our ongoing commitment to provide the best possible text and supplements package to help instructors teach and students succeed. To that end, we have tried to address the diverse needs of today's students through an attractive design, updated figures and graphs, helpful features, careful explanations of topics, and a comprehensive package of supplements and study aids. We have taken special care to respond to the suggestions of users a reviewers and have added new examples and exercises based on their feedback. Students who have never studied algebra - as well as those who require further review of basic algebraic concepts before taking additional courses in mathematics, business, science, nursing, or other fields - will benefit from the text's student-orientated approach.

Chapter 1 - Review of the Real Number System
Chapter 2 - Linear Equations and Applications
Chapter 3 - Linear Inequalities and Absolute Value
Chapter 4 - Graphs, Linear Equations and Functions
Chapter 5 - Systems of Linear Equations
Chapter 6 - Exponents, Polynomials, and Polynomial Functions
Chapter 7 - Factoring
Chapter 8 - Rational Expressions and Functions
Chapter 9 - Roots, Radicals, and Root Functions
Chapter 10 - Quadratic Equations, Inequalities, and Functions
Chapter 11 - Exponential and Logarithmic Functions
Chapter 12 - Nonlinear Functions, Conic Sections, and Nonlinear Systems

Genres: Mathematics, Textbooks, College, Nonfiction, Reference

870 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Marge Lial (late) was always interested in math; it was her favorite subject in the first grade! Her desire to educate both her students and herself inspired the writing of numerous best-selling textbooks. Marge, who received Bachelor's and Master's degrees from California State University at Sacramento, was most recently affiliated with American River College. An avid reader and traveler, Marge’s travel experiences often find their way into her books as applications, exercise sets, and feature sets. She was particularly interested in archeology. Trips to various digs and ruin sites produced some fascinating problems for her textbooks, involving such topics as the building of Mayan pyramids and the acoustics of ancient ball courts in the Yucatan.

Reviews

[Moeen Sahraei]

Algebra is undoubtedly the keystone of mathematics. If you don’t fully learn it’s crucial ingredients like equations, exponential, logarithmic and other functions and... you will definitely encounter serious problems in further complicated subjects such as calculus and statistics. Beside it’s importance, Algebra is an extremely beautiful subject, I remember when I was learning elementary algebra about three years ago, I was so thrilled by it’s intriguing expressions and proofs.
Margaret L. Lial and her colleagues wrote probably the most standard and comprehensive source in this subject. This book is written so intuitively with a lot of examples and it contains more than seventy or even hundred practice problems for every lesson with answers at the end of the book. Personally I enjoyed a lot reading it and solving its problems. And I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn algebra thoroughly.
Keep in mind that this book has 800 pages so learning it properly requires some mental exertion and descipline.

[Kurt]

As a retiree trying to keep his mental acuity honed, I really appreciated this book. I'm not sure what grade level this is aimed at – I suspect high school sophomores or juniors – but it covered a lot of things that I learned back in high school. Since I used math a lot in my career as a computer programmer, much of it was very familiar. Some of it, however, was almost like I was learning it for the first time.

The book contains very good examples and explanations on how to solve problems. There are tons of practice problems. The answers to every odd-numbered problem can be found in the back of the book – which was very helpful and useful to me. At least a dozen times I was convinced I had found an instance in which the given answer was wrong. Every time, however, after a little research and re-calculation, I discovered that it was I, myself, who was in error.

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2nd time (23 August 2025): Still a good math book to help me keep up to speed on my math skills.

[Diane Blum]

I used this text to refresh my memory on upper level algebra.

[Samra]

I hate you algebra. although this book explained it better than the rest.

[Summer]

I should probably rank it higher than "It was OK" since I did make an A in the course, but it's math, and completing the course over a short summer session was NOT fun!

[Lisa Alvarez]

Easy Math Textb6

This was extremely helpful for me when doing my math homework. As I could easily zoom in on the problems that were too tiny for me to read at a textbook angle.

[Jenny]

I hate MATH!!!