This market-leading text continues to provide students and instructors with sound, consistently structured explanations of the mathematical concepts. Designed for a one-term course that prepares students for further study in mathematics, the new Seventh Edition retains the features that have always made College Algebra a complete solution for both students and instructors: interesting applications, pedagogically effective design, and innovative technology combined with an abundance of carefully developed examples and exercises. New! Side-by-side Example Solutions for select examples include multiple problem solving approaches--such as algebraic, graphical, and numerical--to appeal to a variety of teaching and learning styles. New! Checkpoints after each Example/Solution refer students to similar problems in the Section Exercises, giving students the opportunity to practice and reinforce the concepts they just learned. Answers to Checkpoint exercises are included at the back of the book. New! Vocabulary Checks open every set of Section Exercises. This review of mathematical terms, formulas, and theorems provides regular assessment and reinforcement of students' understanding of algebraic language and concepts. Exercise Sets have been carefully analyzed and revised to improve the grading of problems from basic skill-building to challenging; the pairing of similar odd- and even-numbered exercises; update all real data; and add real-life and real-data applications. New! Make a Decision applications--presented throughout the text at the end of selected exercise sets--are based on large sets of real data. These extended modeling applications give students the opportunity to use all the mathematical concepts and techniques they've learned and apply them to large sets of real date--analyzing it, graphing it, and making conjectures about its behavior. These applications are featured in Eduspace and the Online Learning Center in an interactive format.Eduspace, powered by Blackboard, Houghton Mifflin's online learning environment, brings your students quality online homework, tutorials, multimedia, and testing that correspond to the College Algebra text. This content is paired with the recognized course management tools of Blackboard. For copyright 2007, two titles have been added to the Larson/Hostetler Precalculus Series: Precalculus with Limits and Precalculus: A Concise Course. These textbooks enhance the scope of the series, making it even more flexible and adaptable to a variety of learning and teaching styles.