C2 Unusual Questions

these are from an actual UK 2014 exam!!!

the second question I have made harder by removing one structured part.
(LOOK AT THE AMENDED FILE in post 1)

Am I missing something in Q1?



Not sure why that's part of the C2 spec but doesn't use anything you haven't learned at GCSE, it's hardly difficult

In question 2, I imagine the first part is there simply to stop people form using Heron's formula.

I hope you have not upset some, hard working but not as able as you, student users of this site ...

you can still use heron's formula but it is the first part which is very interesting!

But surely a GCSE student would have been taught everything required for that question? I guess they might not know to add 180 to the first angle but you can work that out from seeing tan(0) = tan(180)...

I am glad you can see it so easy but
... my teaching experience tells me
most people (~95%) would be totally destroyed by Q1
almost everybody (~99%+) would be totally destroyed by Q2

And I mean a AS student, not an undergrad ... or a teacher/lecturer

I am glad you can see it so easy but
... my teaching experience tells me
most people (~95%) would be totally destroyed by Q1
almost everybody (~99%+) would be totally destroyed by Q2

And I mean a AS student, not an undergrad ... or a teacher/lecturer

Using the cosine rule twice? If I were writing an exam (especially a C2 exam), I'd feel slightly uneasy placing so many marks (I'm guessing this question was worth quite a few marks) on what is essentially a (albeit more challenging) GCSE question.

TeeEm do you have the answers for Q1? I think I have them but I would like to check.

Question 2 I am not willing to spend energy on to be honest lol xD

I think Gaiaphage has put a full solution out there.

Happy to take your word for it, I go to a public school so it's hardly representative. Not sure if there are some typos in Q2 but it looks like you've put |AB| three times and given two different lengths for it

Using the cosine rule twice? If I were writing an exam (especially a C2 exam), I'd feel slightly uneasy placing so many marks (I'm guessing this question was worth quite a few marks) on what is essentially a (albeit more challenging) GCSE question.

thanks for letting me know about the typos...
hopefully they are obvious/I typed it in a hurry.

I am sitting on a fence but many students here might find this comment contemptuous.

Maybe 'a GCSE question' wasn't the best way of phrasing it. I just meant a question that doesn't use any additional knowledge outside of that which was taught at GCSE.

I'm still not convinced it's as difficult as you think it is though. Yes, it does require two steps (using the cosine rule twice) which perhaps requires slightly more initiative. But there're only so many different things you can do with the information you've been given, and so having eliminated a few of the possibilities, I'd imagine fairly able students should be able to get to the answer without that much difficulty. Although, I guess this is the kind of question that would become a lot more difficult under exam conditions.

It is all good ... Clearly we share slightly different learning and teaching experiences.

Ah I see! Well, I got the correct answers! Although Gaiaphage has made a mistake in his final bit of working! (He gave the value of alpha as 112° rather than 102°).