Additional Resources

Students sometimes find it useful to see additional explanations of topics, particularly review topics.    These are fairly concise explanations that I think are good.    I have also included a few other mathematics topics which we will not explicitly review, but which you do need to know, such as converting between percentages and decimals.  Please look over this list and, if there are any topics you don’t believe you remember well, then use the web resources listed to review these.   You will not have homework nor explicit test questions on these supplemental materials.

Most of these links are to a nice developmental math website called “Purple Math” at http://www.purplemath.com/

For most students the material on Solving Equations below is the most important. (Yellow box below.) Explore all three links before you spend much time on any of them.

Algebra:  What are Variables

http://www.purplemath.com/modules/variable.htm

This is very basic and if you are not pretty comfortable with using variables, you should take a developmental course to prepare for MATH 1333.  But I’m including it here just as a “warm-up” to get used to looking up review materials on this website.

Distributive Property:  Number Properties

http://www.purplemath.com/modules/numbprop.htm

The beginning of this module provides a short discussion of the distributive property.  We will use all the other properties as well, but usually students remember those others fairly well without review.  Students have more trouble using the distributive property in algebraic expressions.

More explanation of the distributive property:  Simplifying with Parentheses I.  http://www.purplemath.com/modules/simparen.htm

Everything on the first page is at the right level to be helpful in MATH 1333.

Solving equations:   Solving Linear Equations (relevant to our Topic A: Algebra Review)

http://www.purplemath.com/modules/solvelin.htm

Both pages 1 and the first part of page 2 are relevant to problems we will work in MATH 1333.

Equation solver for simple and more complicated equations. VERY USEFUL! You type in any equation and it will solve it.

Mary Parker's Equation lessons for Basic Math Skills course. The most relevant ones are Eq. 1 through Eq. 5.

Proportions and Proportion Equations: http://www.algebrahelp.com/lessons/proportionbasics/

Order of operations:  Order of Operations. (relevant to our Topic A: Algebra Review)

http://www.purplemath.com/modules/orderops.htm

Page 2 has the algebra, which we need, but most of the problems are considerably more complicated than anything we’ll use. 

Rounding:  Rounding (relevant to our Topic D: Rounding)

http://www.purplemath.com/modules/rounding.htm

Look at page 1, but don’t go on to page 2, which is Significant Digits, now.  We’ll discuss that in Part II of MATH 1333.

Scientific Notation:  Exponents and Powers III (Relevant to Topic E: Using a Calculator)

http://www.purplemath.com/modules/exponent3.htm

It is very important that you recognize when your calculator or spreadsheet is giving you a result written in scientific notation and that you are able to convert that to the usual notation for numbers.    Also see my materials on Scientific Notation.

Percent:  Converting between Percents, Fractions, and Decimals. (We'll use this in all of our work.)

http://www.purplemath.com/modules/percents.htm

We will occasionally talk about percents in this class, and I will assume that you understand what they mean and how to re-express them as decimals.  There is no need to go on to percent word problems in these lessons. 

Plotting points on a rectangular coordinate system:  The x,y plane (Relevant to Topic B: Formulas and Graphing)

http://www.purplemath.com/modules/solvelin.htm

A very basic reminder of how to plot points. (Relevant to Topic B: Formulas and Graphing)

Graphing on a rectangular coordinate system:  Graphing:  An Overview http://www.purplemath.com/modules/graphing.htm

We will graph only the first type of formulas on this page, but it is useful to see how to make tables of values and do point-plotting to make graphs.  And it might be fun to see all the different shapes one could get.  In this course, we’ll do these graphs sometimes by hand and sometimes on a spreadsheet.  We’ll definitely use the spreadsheet when the formula is very complicated, as are most of the formulas on this page.

Graphing:  Graphing Linear Equations I (Relevant to Topic G. Linear Equations)

http://www.purplemath.com/modules/graphlin.htm

This is probably easy enough that you don’t need much practice, but you might want to look over it.

Finding Slope:  Slope of a straight line I (Relevant to Topic G. Linear Equations)

http://www.purplemath.com/modules/slope.htm

The first page is a good description of how to find the slope from two points.  At the end of the page, horizontal and vertical lines are discussed.  We won’t use those much, but it is good to see that.  There is no need to go on to page 2 about parallel and perpendicular lines.

Slope-intercept form of a linear equation: Straight-line equations I (Relevant to Topic G. Linear Equations)

http://www.purplemath.com/modules/strtlneq.htm

We will use this form of the equation of a line very often.

Point-slope form of a linear equation:  Straight-line equations II (Relevant to Topic G. Linear Equations)

http://www.purplemath.com/modules/strtlneq2.htm

We will use this form of the equation of a line very often.    In MATH 1333, we don’t use fractions much because we just convert them to decimals.  But when we look at math review materials such as these, they do illustrate methods using fractions quite a lot.  If you really can’t follow the work using fractions, discuss with your teacher whether this is enough of a problem that you need to go back and take a course to review fractions.   Here, don’t worry about doing problems with fractions.  Just read the examples to understand which operations you need to perform and then work on our homework using whole numbers and decimals.

Interpeting slope and y-intercept:  The meaning of slope and intercept (Relevant to Topic G. Linear Equations)

http://www.purplemath.com/modules/slopyint.htm

Such interpretations are often hard for students.  I strongly recommend that you read this lesson.

Different measurement systems:  Canceling Units (Useful background knowledge)

http://www.purplemath.com/modules/units.htm

This is a general method which enables one to convert from one type of unit to another, such as feet to meters, etc.  It is a very important method.

Finding the “center” of a dataset:  Mean, median, and mode (Relevant to much later parts of the course.)

http://www.purplemath.com/modules/meanmode.htm

These are three different types of averages.  It doesn’t discuss why you would choose one over the other very much, but does show how to compute them.