The mathematical purpose of this lesson is to help students recall and make sense of the relationships that can be seen across tables, situations, and equations representing the same relationship. The work of this lesson connects with work done in earlier grades, as students inspect two related quantities and connect them to situations and expressions.

This lesson prepares students to begin the work in the associated Algebra 1 lesson by helping them recall what they know about relating situations and tables to linear equations in slope-intercept form and standard form. This will help students as they look at tabular representations of the relationships between two variables. Students look for and make sense use of a structure (MP7) when they consider how the same linear relationship is represented across tables, situations, and equations.