Question

Which property would allow you to use mental computation to simplify the problem 27 + 15 + 3 + 5?

additive identity
additive inverse
commutative property of addition
distributive property

Answers

GPT-4o mini
The property that would allow you to use mental computation to simplify the problem \( 27 + 15 + 3 + 5 \) is the **commutative property of addition**. This property states that the order in which you add the numbers does not change their sum.

Using the commutative property, you can rearrange the numbers to group them in a way that makes mental computation easier. For example, you could group \( 27 + 3 \) and \( 15 + 5 \) together, which simplifies to \( 30 + 20 = 50 \).

So the correct answer is:
**commutative property of addition**.