Mathematical Miscellany #73

A compilation post this week…


November exam revision

Added to the revision collection for November exams are the papers and mark schemes from White Rose Maths (scroll down) for AQA, Edexcel and OCR.

White Rose Maths

GCSE Practice Papers can be found for November 2022 exams, also still available are the papers for Summer 2022.

The pre-exam workshops were created for the Summer examinations, but these can make excellent revision resources at any time.

White Rose Maths

Multiple Choice questions

MathsHKO – Multiple Choice

From Helen Konstantine on MATHSHKO a lovely page of Multiple Choice questions. There is quite a collection here, these can make ideal starters.


My Revision Notes – Worked Examples

Hodder examples
Hodder – Solutions for My Revision Notes (Pure)

On my page on A Level worked examples, I highlighted the My Revision Notes books from Hodder. Many books are available in the My Revision Notes series, most with a free document of worked examples; questions and fully worked solutions for each section of the book are provided, whilst the documents refer to the books, they are complete in themselves. It’s good to see a book with this document for the International GCSE Mathematics from Pearson. I have added this to the IGCSE page.


Visnos Visual Numbers

Visnos Visual Numbers

A recent interesting online discussion recently on some students using only digital devices for telling the time made me wonder about resources for telling the time using a clock face. Looking at the KS2 programme of study, I see references to clocks, including tell and write the time to five minutes, including quarter past/to the hour and draw the hands on a clock face to show these times. Have a look at this demonstration, Time Angle and Fractions from Visnos Visual Numbers. I was happily distracted by many of the other demonstrations!


To log or not to log

Talking to a group of students recently about logs we used a favourite (I have many favourites!) Underground Maths resource – To log or not to log?

Underground Mathematics

To log or not to log – Underground Mathematics

This has worked really well every time I have used it. The activity requires students to think about the methods which could be used to solve the various equations. I have always found that in addition to working on indices and logarithms this task has exposed some misconceptions, with students trying to invent some new and invalid laws of logarithms!

This problem is classified as a Problem Requiring Decisions.

Students are often used to problems being posed in such a way that they have all the information that they require in order to start, and no more. Problems (especially from the real world) are very often not like this, and so resources of this type will give students the opportunity to develop the skills needed to deal with this. Some problems might not contain enough information, so students may need to decide on classifications, make assumptions or approximations, or do some research in order to move forward. Some problems might contain too much data, so that part of the challenge is to identify the useful information.

Here’s what my students said:


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