needing some math help

http://www.math.com/homeworkhelp/basicmath.html - i've linked you into the basic math section of math.com. you can also access algebra and geometry and other math subjects by clicking the down arrow under the "select subject" at the left side of the page.

http://www.interactmath.com/asp/wizardframe.htm . at this site you can access online practice problems from many different math textbooks published by pearson for free. i took a quick look at one called basic mathematics, 10e, enhanced by bittinger. the link i have given you puts you at the start page where you use the arrow to open the menu box to find and click on the title of the book. you will find a number of basic math and pre-algebra books listed there. don't be intimated by all the other titles you will see. pearson is a big publisher of math textbooks. click on the bittinger book i mention above, click submit. you will enter an installation wizard. you will have to download two drivers to your computer in order to use the software at this site. they should not take that long, but are necessary in order to be able to work with the fractions and for the program to do the math calculation necessary. once you get through those two downloads and actually get to the material there will be drop down menus to access the math exercises which are organized by the various chapters of the book. you will find many of the subject areas you mentioned in your post. click on the exercises and get to work! what is nice about this site is that it will generate similar problems before you move on to successively more difficult ones. you can move backward and forward among the problems as you like. and, it will show you how to work each and every problem step-by-step if you ask it to do so. i used this site for my intermediate algebra and now for my trigonometry and it has been worth it's weight in gold! and best of all--it's free and you can access it 24 hours a day. if you find you don't like the book i picked for you, pick another one yourself from the list and check it out to see if you like it better. i think you will find this one of the most painless ways to review and learn what you do or don't know.

the answer to the first problem is 40.

the answer to the second problem is 75.

these are simple linear algebraic problems involving decimals. let me show you how to set them up and work them out.

8.5% of what is 3.4? is actually a word problem. the word "of" is another way of saying "multiplied by". the word "what" can be replaced with an "x" or and "n" because it is the unknown thing you are being asked to find. the word "is" stands for the equal sign. putting all that together in place of the words you have this:

you have one other problem here and that is converting the percentage to a decimal to make things nice and neat. to convert a percentage to a decimal you merely remove the percentage sign and replace it with the fraction 1/100. in other words, you divide 8.6 by 100 which will give you 0.086, it's decimal equivalent. now, you have this equivalent equation:

isolate the n on one side of the equation by dividing both sides of the equation by 0.086. (remember whatever you do to one side of an equation you must do to the other side of an equation to keep things equal.)

which simplifies to:

the second problem is worked exactly the same way:

converting the .5% to a decimal (.5/100) you have:

divide both sides by 0.005 to isolate the n

and, simplify

you can find instruction in working percentage problems like this in prealgebra books. this link http://www.math.com/school/subject1/lessons/s1u1l7gl.html will take you into the explanation of percentages in the pre-algebra section of math.com. click on step #3 at the top of the page and it will take you to a page with examples exactly similar to the problems i just solved for you. good luck with your studies. did you link into a pre-algebra book on interactmath.com as i suggested? you will find plenty of practice problems like this there along with explanations of how to work them.