Post...

Okay so it's Sunday night...I'm slightly bored/aggravated, and I have no idea what to blog about... I guess I will take a look at the previous tests we took and see what you guys often missed and see if I can explain it a little better.

Okay, one question that surprised me that people still didn't know was a question about "change in y with respect to x". Basically all this means is take the implicit derivative. If you have forgotten, all you do for implicit derivatives is take the derivative like normal except whenever you take the derivative of y, write dy/dx. After you have taken the derivative, move all like terms to one side (i.e. move the dy/dx's on one side, and the terms without dy/dx's on the other side). Factor out dy/dx and then divide by what's left on that side. You should now have dy/dx = something/something. That is your answer.

Something that some of you are still not doing is a little trick for determining local minimums... Say for instance you have a function. You take the derivative of that function, and set equal to 0 and solve. This will give you the possible points of inflection. The easiest way to determine if it is a minimum (on multiple choice) is to take the second derivative and plug in. If it comes out negative (concave up), it was a minimum. If it comes out negative (concave down), it was a maximum. Using shortcuts like this is really really useful when you need to save time on the AP multiple choice (or at least I imagine it would be).

I can not stress the following enough: simplify an integral before you do it. It's almost always easier...especially on those ones where it looks really difficult to integrate, like it was something you've never done before...Well most of the time it's just written in an odd way...for instance, the integral of 4e^(2lnx)...that's a bit annoying to integrate...you can change it to 4e^(lnx^2) which makes it a lot easier because now the e and the ln cancel, leaving you with 4x^2, which is a very simple integral. So please, just remember to simplify before you integrate.

Anyway, going to go find something to do.