Chapter 17
Ten Missteps to Avoid
IN THIS CHAPTER
Avoiding some common mistakes that pre-calculus students make
Reviewing some relevant pre-calculus rules
One the more popular video games from a few years back featured a little guy with a square head running through the square jungle, swinging on square vines, and jumping over square alligators in square swamps. He was avoiding the pitfalls of the jungle. Consider this chapter the vine you can use to jump over the pitfalls that normally trip up the pre-calculus student. And you don’t have to be a video game geek to understand this chapter!
Going Out of Order (of Operations)
Operations in an expression or an equation aren’t all meant to be done from left to right. For example,
doesn’t equal
or
. You’re supposed to do multiplication first, which means distributing the
first . And then you combine like terms to get .
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