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Must find many walls to bang my head against
Mon Jul 07 2003

I had a quiz in class tonight. Did I remember that I had a quiz?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

It was firmly lodged in my mind that my quiz was not until Wednesday. WRONG!!!!

I think I did OK. I will know for sure on Wednesday. The quiz mostly covered completely factoring the sum of and difference of squares & cubes, division of polynomials, calculating the age of an item based on % of C14, figuring out how long it has been since a thyroid test based on % of radioactive iodine found in a person's system, determining population of bacteria or a virus if the growth rate doubles or triples at a particular rate, and based on Pascal's triangle, determining what numbers you would have with a 4th, 5th, 6th or 7th degree equation, at any given position.

For example, (x + 1)^6, find the 4th term.

Using Pascal's triangle: (I'm too tired tonight to play with this so it appears as a proper triangle, so forgive the appearance of it!)

1
1 1
1 2 1
1 3 3 1
1 4 6 4 1
1 5 10 10 5 1
1 6 15 20 15 6 1

you would see that the 4th term is 20, therefore you would have:
20(x^3)(1^3) so the answer should be 20x^3 as the 4th term of the equation
(x + 1)^6.

OK, my head hurts now. I'm going to attempt to stop the numbers from dancing around my brain long enough for me to fall asleep.

Wish me luck!

OH, and any math whiz's out there that see anything wrong with how I did this, please let me know so I can throttle my teacher for instructing my class incorrectly on this. We already determined that he taught us incorrectly on the carbon dating as we all got the same answers on that and we were all wrong.

5 Comments
  • From:
    Sezrah (Legacy)
    On:
    Tue Jul 08 2003
    i'm happy to add that i have no idea what you just said :)

    sez
  • From:
    Palimpsest (Legacy)
    On:
    Wed Jul 09 2003
    Whoa! You just blew past anything I am able to remember without a refresher course.

    I'll try to get The Socialist to give a peek at this tonight. Mr. Math Professor ought to be able to tell you if what you did is correct. I wouldn't put it past him to explain carbon dating calculations to you either. He's a whiz at that stuff.
  • From:
    Palimpsest (Legacy)
    On:
    Wed Jul 09 2003
    Whoa! You just blew past anything I am able to remember without a refresher course.

    I'll try to get The Socialist to give a peek at this tonight. Mr. Math Professor ought to be able to tell you if what you did is correct. I wouldn't put it past him to explain carbon dating calculations to you either. He's a whiz at that stuff.
  • From:
    Palimpsest (Legacy)
    On:
    Wed Jul 09 2003
    *grumble* D$&@)@%* stupid muscle twitches. I really only intended to enter that once, but my fingers had independent ideas on the subject.
  • From:
    TraumaMama (Legacy)
    On:
    Fri Jul 11 2003
    Isn't Pascal's Triangle awesome? I had to do a "project" on it while in Math 70.