• Congratulations to the Class of 2024 on your results!
    Let us know how you went here
    Got a question about your uni preferences? Ask us here

Maths ext 2 help (1 Viewer)

Streetboy

Member
Joined
Jan 12, 2013
Messages
186
Gender
Female
HSC
N/A
Hey Guys,

I have me exam coming up soon on Complex numbers, polynomials, conics and graphs.

I really struggle with conics and graphs and I was just asking what would be the best effective way to study for the exam in general and how to learn conics and graphs topic.

Thank you guys,

I wish all of you a success.
 

Carrotsticks

Retired
Joined
Jun 29, 2009
Messages
9,494
Gender
Undisclosed
HSC
N/A
The best resource for the Graphs topic, for the typical "Here's f(x), draw 1/f(x)" etc are past HSC questions and/or past Trial papers. There are plenty of trial papers out there so don't worry about running out of them.

As for Conics, again the best resource are past HSC questions and even the Coroneos textbook. The reason why I say past HSC questions are the best is because they are often proofs for nice results that actually require some sort of thinking, as opposed to many trial paper questions which involve just mindless calculations. Many HSC questions have no numbers, just pronumerals, so if you can do those, you can most certainly do numerical problems =)

Also, Conics problems in school papers and/or HSC papers are GENERALLY split into a few main categories, so best to try to tackle them one by one.

1. Prove that XXXXX is independent of P (or theta). For these ones, XXXXX is usually the area of a triangle or the product of two things.

2. Prove that PT x PR = PS^2 or PT x PR = b^2. These types are asked very often (most recently in 2012 HSC), and they're usually quite straightforward.

3. Locus problems. Although the syllabus specifically states that locus problems (to do with the ellipse and hyperbola except rectangular hyperbolas) are NOT to be asked in assessments, they still appear in assessments AND even in the HSC exam. However, they circumvent this by asking questions like "Prove that XXXX lies on the circle YYYYY" as opposed to "Prove that the locus of XXXXXX is YYYYY", which is essentially the same thing anyway (most recently 2011 HSC).

4. Sketching and labelling features. These questions are very typical and standard. It involves the usual "Find the equation of the directrices, asymptotes etc".

Of course, you have miscellaneous problems like "Prove that A,B,C are collinear" or "Prove that AB is perpendicular to CD" type problems, but they are generally fairly straightforward.
 

Users Who Are Viewing This Thread (Users: 0, Guests: 1)

Top