The top 5 things I learnt this course are as follows
- Solving and evaluating radicals and roots
- Solving quadratic equations
- Analyzing quadratic equations
- Rational expressions
- Trigonometry
Solving and evaluating radicals and roots
Being able to solve and evaluate radicals is a very valuable skill for any upcoming math I would need to do. Radicals can be in any part of the other units we did and I found that I needed to know this info for most of the tests. I expect to see more radicals in upcoming math courses and I’m glad I now know how to do this. The same thing goes for roots. I see roots in almost every math problem and being able to work with roots is really important to be able to do precalculus.
Solving quadratic equations
Solving a quadratic equation was a very common step throughout the entire course, much like radicals. Because of this, I found that it was important that I know how to solve any quadratic equation put in front of me to be able to succeed.
Analyzing quadratic equations
Analyzing quadratic equations and learning about putting it on graphs was helpful and will be helpful in solving future problems. I find myself to be a very visual learner and being able to visualize an equation was very useful and an important tool to help me understand what I’m doing better instead of just following steps and hoping I did it right.
Rational expressions
Because I learnt how to deal with fractions with variables I have a wider variety of tools to help me solve word problems. Before this course, when I was given certain data and told to find another piece, I would often get stumped and lost. Being able to put variables in fractions opens up a whole new opportunity for equations and problems for me to solve.
Trigonometry
As much as I would like to put trig first, it is in fifth place because it doesn’t have as many applications as the other units. I personally really love trig and find it to be very fun when done right. It is useful for any real-life situations where I would need to find any sides or angles of a triangle or any situation I could superimpose a triangle onto. For example, I like to build things, and knowing this info I can easily find the dimensions of anything I would want to that has a triangle within it.