This guide will help you grasp the principles and concepts you need to score high in pre-calculus.

Pre-Calculus is the academic step before the incorporation of Calculus principles applied to real and imagined universal problems. A student entering a Pre-Calculus environment should be familiar with mathematics as a language and skill useful in both defined and imagined spaces. Pre-Calculus introduces mathematicians to a compendium of symbols and universal concepts including line tangentials, maximums and minimums, logarithmic line equations, the...

Pre-calculus courses have become increasingly popular with 35 percent of students in the U.S. taking the course in middle or high school. Often, completion of such a course is a prerequisite for calculus and other upper level mathematics courses. Pre-Calculus For Dummies is an invaluable resource for students enrolled in pre-calculus courses. By presenting the essential topics in a clear and concise manner, the book helps students improve their understanding...

Precalculus is important preparation for calculus, but it's also a useful set of skills in its own right, drawing on algebra, trigonometry, and other topics. As an introduction, review the essential concept of the function, try your hand at simple problems, and hear Professor Edwards's recommendations for approaching the series.

Explore exponential functions, which have a base greater than 1 and a variable as the exponent. Survey the properties of exponents, the graphs of exponential functions, and the unique properties of the natural base e. Then sample a typical problem in compound interest.

You've already used inequalities to express the set of values in the domain of a function. Now study the notation for inequalities, how to represent inequalities on graphs, and techniques for solving inequalities, including those involving absolute value, which occur frequently in calculus.

Investigate rational functions, which are quotients of polynomials. First, find the domain of the function. Then, learn how to recognize the vertical and horizontal asymptotes, both by graphing and comparing the values of the numerator and denominator. Finally, look at some applications of rational functions.

How do you model a situation involving three variables, such as a motion problem that introduces time as a third variable in addition to position and velocity? Discover that parametric equations are an efficient technique for solving such problems. In one application, you calculate whether a baseball hit at a certain angle and speed will be a home run.

Discover how functions can be combined in various ways, including addition, multiplication, and composition. A special case of composition is the inverse function, which has important applications. One way to recognize inverse functions is on a graph, where the function and its inverse form mirror images across the line y = x.

An equation that is true for every possible value of a variable is called an identity. Review several trigonometric identities, seeing how they can be proved by choosing one side of the equation and then simplifying it until a true statement remains. Such identities are crucial for solving complicated trigonometric equations.