World Book Day last Thursday inspired me to update the page on free books page; working further on that page has inspired me to create a further page.
Nelson Thornes GCSE Texts
Several books are available – answers included. Perhaps these will be handy when we get the new A Level specifications!
Checking some of the Nuffield National Curriculum books proved a distraction as the following activity in one of the texts (Number and Algebra) reminded me that I wanted to revisit iteration for a revision session with my Year 10 GCSE students.
. I thought these questions would provide a way to revise several topics – simultaneous equations, solving equations graphically and iteration. Graphical solution to equations is something that seems to puzzle students and it does not come naturally to them that you can solve an equation by rearrangement.
I decided we will look at question IV, first we can use algebra to form a cubic equation in x, then solve the cubic by trial and improvement – a familiar method that seems more intuitive to students than rearrangement.
Then we can rearrange the equation – plot the graphs and show that we still get the same result. The next step is to impress them with using the rearrangement in the form of an iterative techniques question – it’s a lot quicker than trial and improvement. This is a particularly able set of students so I have gone well beyond what we need here; I checked the rearrangement on Autograph hence some of the additional slides in the file I have included below in case it is useful to anyone.
I thought I would include this AQA practice question for the new GCSE as when we looked at iteration earlier this year the subscripts really bothered students; my colleague said exactly the same of his set.
pdf file
Returning to a Nuffield text I mentioned earlier, I found this question in one of the exercises (an isolated question, I couldn’t see any more). Now what’s the probability of that?!
