Download One common problem in Calculus is Algebra skills (or lack of)… You

One common problem in Calculus is Algebra skills (or lack of)…
You can save yourself lots of time and headache this semester by doing some early review.
Remember to simplify before entering things into your calculator (if you need to at all) and remember that your
calculator follows standard order of operations so you can avoid overuse of parenthesis and get things entered
faster when you know what your calculator is thinking.
Some items will be covered in class as needed, but these are few that come up regularly that you should review
for yourself and ask if you need help!
Here are some things that I expect you to know at the start of the semester, some of which can be found in
appendix A of your text.
1. Distributive law and factoring example: 4(x+5)=4x+20
2. “order of operations”: stuff inside parentheses is done first, then exponents, the mult/div then
add/sub Your calculator uses these rules and it is helpful to know this when entering info, especially
in the case of parentheses.
3. Fractions: Reducing, adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing
4. Rules for exponents: meanings and properties of positive, negative and zero exponents
5. Calculating percentages
Here are some Algebra tutorials that I found online. This document is also on Blackboard so that you can just
click the links.
http://www.purplemath.com/modules/index.htm (just explanations and examples, no extra practice)
Fractions, number properties, exponents
http://math.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ/Ya&sdn=math&cdn=education&tm=10&f=00&tt=14&b
t=1&bts=0&zu=http%3A//www.wtamu.edu/academic/anns/mps/math/mathlab/col_algebra/ (explanations and
examples with practice problems)
Start with the ‘beginning algebra’ the Tutorials on fractions, properties of real numbers, exponents and negative
exponents sections (Tutorials 3,8, 6, 29)
http://www.algebasics.com/ (videos showing step by step)
http://www.themathpage.com/alg/algebra.htm (uses mouse-over to show answer) modules 13,14, 21
http://www.intmath.com/ (explanations, but less wordy than first two)
Algebra->Numbers-> Order of operations;powers; roots and radicals
Algebra->Exponents and Radicals->Simplifying
Fractions help: http://www.helpwithfractions.com/