WHY do we use LETTERS in MATHS?

We use letters in maths because they help us talk about numbers without knowing exactly what they are yet, like having a name for something we haven’t met.

Imagine you have a bag of apples, and you don’t know how many are inside. Instead of saying “I don’t know,” you can say “Let’s call the number of apples x.” Now you can use x in your thinking, just like you’d use a name for a friend. If you give away 3 apples, you can write it as x - 3, which means “the number of apples after giving some away.”

When you’re trying to figure out how many apples were in the bag at first, letters make things clearer. You might know that after giving away 3 apples, you have 7 left, so now you can write x - 3 = 7. This is like a puzzle: if I take 3 from something and get 7, what was it before?

Using letters lets you play with numbers in your mind, just like playing with blocks or toys. You can move them around, add them up, and even share them, all without knowing the exact number at first!