Precalculus, Global Edition

Book Preface

As a professor of mathematics at an urban public university for 35 years, I understand the varied needs of precalculus students. Students range from being underprepared, with little mathematical background and a fear of mathematics, to being highly prepared
and motivated. For some, this is their final course in mathematics. For others, it is preparation for future mathematics courses. I have written this text with both groups in mind.

A tremendous benefit of authoring a successful series is the broad-based feedback I receive from teachers and students who have used previous editions. I am sincerely grateful for their support. Virtually every change to this edition is the result of their thoughtful comments and suggestions. I hope that I have been able to take their ideas and, building upon a successful foundation of the ninth edition, make this series an even better learning and teaching tool for students and teachers.

Features in the Tenth Edition

A descriptive list of the many special features of Precalculus can be found on the endpapers in the front of this text. This list places the features in their proper context, as building blocks of an overall learning system that has been carefully crafted over the years to help students get the most out of the time they put into studying. Please take the time to review this and to discuss it with your students at the beginning of your course. My experience has been that when students utilize these features, they are more successful in the course.

New to the Tenth Edition

• Retain Your Knowledge This new category of problems in the exercise set are based on the article “To Retain
New Learning, Do the Math” published in the Edurati Review. In this article, Kevin Washburn suggests that “the more students are required to recall new content or skills, the better their memory will be.” It is frustrating when students cannot recall skills learned earlier in the course. To alleviate this recall problem, we have created “Retain Your Knowledge” problems. These are problems considered to be “final exam material” that students can use to maintain their skills. Answers to all these problems appear in the back of the book, and all are programmed in MyMathLab.
• Guided Lecture Notes Ideal for online, emporium/ redesign courses, inverted classrooms, or traditional lecture classrooms. These lecture notes help students take thorough, organized, and understandable notes as they watch the Author in Action videos. They ask students to complete definitions, procedures, and examples based on the content of the videos and text.

In addition, experience suggests that students learn by doing and understanding the why/how of the concept or property. Therefore, many sections will have an exploration activity to motivate student learning. These explorations introduce the topic and/or connect it to either a real-world application or a previous section. For example, when the vertical-line test is discussed in Section 2.2, after the theorem statement, the notes ask the students to explain why the vertical-line test works by using the definition of a function. This challenge helps students process the information at a higher level of understanding.
• Illustrations Many of the figures now have captions to help connect the illustrations to the explanations in the body of the text.
• TI Screen Shots In this edition we have replaced all the screen shots from the ninth edition with screen shots using TI-84Plus C. These updated screen shots help students visualize concepts clearly and help make stronger connections between equations, data, and graphs in full color.
• Chapter Projects, which apply the concepts of each chapter to a real-world situation, have been enhanced to give students an up-to-the-minute experience. Many projects are new and Internet-based, requiring the student to research information online in order to solve problems.
• Exercise Sets All the exercises in the text have been reviewed and analyzed for this edition, some have been removed, and new ones have been added. All time-sensitive problems have been updated to the most recent information available. The problem sets remain classified according to purpose.

The ‘Are You Prepared?’ problems have been improved to better serve their purpose as a just-in-time review of concepts that the student will need to apply in the upcoming section.

The Concepts and Vocabulary problems have been expanded and now include multiple-choice exercises. Together with the fill-in-the-blank and True/False problems, these exercises have been written to serve as reading quizzes.

Skill Building problems develop the student’s computational skills with a large selection of exercises that are directly related to the objectives of the section. Mixed Practice problems offer a comprehensive assessment of skills that relate to more than one objective. Often these require skills learned earlier in the course. Applications and Extensions problems have been updated. Further, many new application-type exercises have been added, especially ones involving information and data drawn from sources the student will recognize, to improve relevance and timeliness.

The Explaining Concepts: Discussion and Writing exercises have been improved and expanded to provide more opportunity for classroom discussion and group projects.