Articles & Books From Pre-Calculus

Pre-Calculus All-in-One For Dummies
The easy way to understand and retain all the concepts taught in pre-calculus classes Pre-Calculus All-in-One For Dummies is a great resource if you want to do you best in Pre-Calculus. Packed with lessons, examples, and practice problems in the book, plus extra chapter quizzes online, it gives you absolutely everything you need to succeed in pre-calc.
Article / Updated 08-14-2023
As you work through pre-calculus, adopting certain tasks as habits can help prepare your brain to tackle your next challenge: calculus. In this article, you find ten habits that should be a part of your daily math arsenal. Perhaps you’ve been told to perform some of these tasks since elementary school — such as showing all your work — but other tricks may be new to you.
Article / Updated 05-03-2023
Once you have used the rational root theorem to list all of the possible rational roots of any polynomial, the next step is to test the roots. One way is to use long division of polynomials and hope that when you divide you get a remainder of 0. Once you have a list of possible rational roots, you then pick one and assume that it’s a root.
Article / Updated 10-06-2022
At some point, your pre-calculus teacher will ask you to find the general formula for the nth term of an arithmetic sequence without knowing the first term or the common difference. In this case, you will be given two terms (not necessarily consecutive), and you will use this information to find a1 and d. The steps are: Find the common difference d, write the specific formula for the given sequence, and then find the term you're looking for.
Article / Updated 09-22-2022
You can use the sum and difference formulas for cosine to calculate the cosine of the sums and differences of angles similarly to the way you can use the sum and difference formulas for sine, because the formulas look very similar to each other. When working with sines and cosines of sums and differences of angles, you're simply plugging in given values for the variables (angles).
Article / Updated 08-08-2022
The 30-60-90 triangle is shaped like half of an equilateral triangle, cut straight down the middle along its altitude. It has angles of 30 degrees, 60 degrees, and 90 degrees, thus, its name! In any 30-60-90 triangle, you see the following: The shortest leg is across from the 30-degree angle, the length of the hypotenuse is always double the length of the shortest leg, and you can find the length of the long leg by multiplying the short leg by the square root of 3.
Pre-Calculus: 1001 Practice Problems For Dummies (+ Free Online Practice)
Practice your way to a better grade in pre-calc Pre-Calculus: 1001 Practice Problems For Dummies gives you 1,001 opportunities to practice solving problems from all the major topics in Pre-Calculus—in the book and online! Get extra help with tricky subjects, solidify what you’ve already learned, and get in-depth walk-throughs for every problem with this useful book.
Cheat Sheet / Updated 04-06-2022
Pre-calculus uses the information you know from Algebra I and II and ratchets up the difficulty level to prepare you for calculus. This cheat sheet is designed to help you review key formulas and functions on the fly as you study. It includes formulas, the laws of logarithmic functions, trigonometric values of basic angles, conic section equations, and interval notation.
Cheat Sheet / Updated 02-24-2022
Pre-calculus draws from algebra, geometry, and trigonometry and combines these topics to prepare you for the techniques you need to succeed in calculus.This cheat sheet provides the most frequently used formulas, with brief descriptions of what the letters and symbols represent. Counting techniques are also here, letting you count numbers of events without actually having to list all the ways to do them.
Article / Updated 12-21-2021
The fundamental theorem of algebra can help you find imaginary roots. Imaginary roots appear in a quadratic equation when the discriminant of the quadratic equation — the part under the square root sign (b2 – 4ac) — is negative. If this value is negative, you can’t actually take the square root, and the answers are not real.