Unit 1

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Before we even began working in our books I made sure that everyone had a brief review of fractions. Remember Mr. Burns' Shortcut?
If you forget you can go to this website, which describes my exact shortcut. I think you'll find that this shortcut will save you a lot of time and can be used even when you get into higher level math.
After our review of fractions, we started in on Unit 1 in the book.






Here are the notes from Sections 1.1-1.3 You may find them useful for studying or filling in gaps in your notes.





In this unit we covered:
1. Finding terms in a sequence
2. Finding the nth term
You can find some notes on finding the nth term here. Click on the icon. .
We spent some time finding the nth term of a sequence when there was a constant first difference, but we also spent some time on finding the nth term with a constant second difference. Remember that we had to factor the numbers and find a pattern before we knew what the constant differences were.

Here are some practice problems if you want to review.





3. Order of Operations. Remember PEMDAS?

4. Plotting points on a coordinate plane.

5. Establishing equations to represent real-life situations.

6. Scatter Plots.
We did an in-class "wave experiment" to collect data and represent the scatter plot. If you want to see 160,000 people break the world record for performing the wave at Bristol Motor Speedway, click here. It makes our little classroom wave seem like nothing.

The most important information that we can gather from scatter plots is the general trend of the data. We talked about that trend in terms of the correlation between the two variables.
Does the data have a POSITIVE CORRELATION, NEGATIVE CORRELATION, or NO CORRELATION?

We must look at the trend line to find out.