The mathematical purpose of this lesson is to introduce students to representing contexts with inequalities since they will work with similar situations in their Algebra 1 lesson, and to demonstrate a specific strategy for representing situations using inequalities.

Students who struggle sometimes have a hard time making sense of a context and representing it symbolically, even when they could successfully think of specific values that will satisfy the situation, or test whether specific values will work. This strategy supports them as they use their quantitative reasoning and generalize it to create a symbolic description of the inequality (MP2), by taking advantage of repeated reasoning (MP8).