HD Homework Help Thread!

[Rosti_LFC]

Yay I understand the partial factoring and completing the square. And yes i didnt forget the ^2  thanks everyone who replied. I do have another question but it's just for advice. Generally when im faved with wordproblems, drawing a picture helps me alot. I have trouvle knowing where to start though. Any things i should look out for?

Drawing a picture/graph/diagram is typically always a good thing, especially when you start getting to more complex physical or mathematical problems. Even if you don't directly need one to solve the problem it's never a bad idea.

With word problems there's no specific trick to it, though if you struggle with word problems and not so much regular problems, the first step if you can figure out what it's trying to ask you would be to go through and write each bit of information they give you as an equation, and then you can ignore the word question and just work from the equations you've pulled from it. I can't really demonstrate what I mean without examples but hope it helps.

[kwillin]

I know I'm not around that often, however, I actually teach different topics in chemistry/physics. I'd say that the subject I'd be most useful for would be quantum mechanics.

[zaphod77]

The only reason to "complete the square" is because they haven't given you the quadratic formula yet.

In fact, it exists because someone doing a lot of completing the square noticed that s/he was always doing the same thing.

Completing the square on 0=ax^2+bx+c gives you the quadratic formula with a b and c as unknowns.

That said, sometimes a quadratic equation will be easy to factor, and if so, that's usually faster than the quadratic formula.

for word problems, the general method is to look through them, and convert them from english to a system of equations by assigning variables to the unknowns in the word problem, and restating sentences involving them as equations.

The really simple problems just have one equation and one variable.  More complex problem swill have more variables and more equations.  Once you have your equations you can use all the tools in your algebra toolbox on them.

[EagleLover58]

What's a good way to learn about grammer(good read for study)

[Extruderx]

This book should be helpful, it's a favorite of mine
(also very decent for non-natives such as me).

Later you should get the advanced level of the book with the same name.
For practice - read more Harddrop, especially the earlier posts.

[EagleLover58]

Thanks