Term 2 Week 1

A promising start to the development of Nuclear Fusion - people who develop their maths abilities do have the option to become mad scientists...

Welcome back to maths in second term!

The Bushelle group is doing more work with Exploring Number.

The Hammer group is doing more advanced Algebra - Products and Factors.

For example - what if you had to multiply two expressions together?

(a + 1) x (b + 2)

Because we are scrupulously fair we must multiply everything in the first expression by everything in the second one so we end up with:

= a x b + a x 2 + 1 x b + 1 x 2
= ab + 2a + b + 2

As always we can test this by putting in some actual numbers - say a = 5 and b = 7

so (a + 1)(b +2) = (5 + 1)(7 + 2) = (6)(9) = 54
and ab + 2a + b + 2 = 5 x 7 + 2 x 5 + 7 + 2 = 35 + 10 + 7 + 2 = 54

Which gives us some confidence that our multiplication of algebra expressions works!

The Products and Factors Assignment 1 is here