Precalculus: A Self-Teaching Guide

Book Preface

Before proceeding to precalculus, we’ll review some basic concepts. This chapter provides a bridge from elementary algebra to intermediate algebra and other topics in precalculus. Most of these concepts should be somewhat familiar, and you should be able to quickly pick up where you left off in algebra, whether it was last week, last year, or even the last millennium.
When you’ve completed this chapter you should be able to work with:

• exponents
• polynomials
• rational exponents and radicals
• factoring
• basic geometry
• applications

Before we begin, try the following pretest to get an idea of how much review you need, if any. If you get a perfect score on the pretest, you can skip chapter 1 and go directly to chapter 2. To learn precalcu­lus you have to have your intermediate algebra down cold.