Just started A Level Maths...

Hello everyone, new poster here.
I have recently started my A level maths course, being 6 weeks behind due to illness; which has also left me hospitalized for a few months. I also need to catch up on all my GCSEs that I have missed, but anyway, can anyone explain to me in simple terms "Integration and Differentiation" and its related stuff? Bitesize makes it look too complicated...

Thanks in advance.

Reply 1

doodle_333

19

Can you ask your maths teacher to give you some catch up sessions? it's probably easiest to understand if you can sit down and work through some examples with someone

Reply 2

16Characters....

13

Original post by Kaidai

Hello everyone, new poster here.
I have recently started my A level maths course, being 6 weeks behind due to illness; which has also left me hospitalized for a few months. I also need to catch up on all my GCSEs that I have missed, but anyway, can anyone explain to me in simple terms "Integration and Differentiation" and its related stuff? Bitesize makes it look too complicated...

Thanks in advance.

Differentiation is concerned with finding rates of change. In general at AS you will mostly be dealing with the gradients of curves. You will know from GCSE that the gradient of a straight line can be found by looking at the coefficient of x in the equation when it is in the form

y = mx + c

. Using calculus you will be able to find the gradient of a curve, which can be viewed as the gradient at "one instant", or perhaps more usefully as the gradient of a tangent to the curve at that point.

Consider the curve y = x^2. We can differentiate this to leave us with an expression called the derivative. If we plug a value of x into the derivative, it will give us the gradient at that x-coordinate. We denote the derivative of y (with respect to x, i.e. we are finding the rate at which y changes as x changes) by

\frac{dy}{dx}

.

To actually differentiate

y = x^2

we multiply the x^2 by the power, 2, and then reduce the power by 1. This leaves us

\frac{dy}{dx} = 2x^1 = 2x

.

Does that make sense? Try differentiating the following:

i)

y = x^3

ii)

y = 4x^2

iii)

y = x

(edited 8 years ago)

Reply 3

Hashim123

2

Original post by Kaidai

Hello everyone, new poster here.
I have recently started my A level maths course, being 6 weeks behind due to illness; which has also left me hospitalized for a few months. I also need to catch up on all my GCSEs that I have missed, but anyway, can anyone explain to me in simple terms "Integration and Differentiation" and its related stuff? Bitesize makes it look too complicated...

Thanks in advance.

Sorry, can't really help with the Maths, but I'm curious - did you apply in September and just delay doing in, or did you apply more recently? Asking as someone planning to get onto doing some A Levels, and wondering whether the college will take me at this point.

Reply 4

JPencil

9

I agree with the above poster get some catch up sessions. As far as you're concerned for C1 and C2, differentiation is the process of finding the gradient at any point of a curve (instantaneous rate of change) and integration is finding the area under a curve given two point. That is just for C1 and C2, i would strongly recomend reading around the subject :smile:

Reply 5

spacewalker

7

I would advise you watching maths tutorials videos on YouTube. Here are introductory videos to Differentiation and Integration:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ayf9gKwjXlY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuiLeNbAqwE

For future reference if you find it effective studying like that, here are some channels that used to help me a lot:

https://www.youtube.com/user/ExamSolutions/videos
https://www.youtube.com/user/patrickJMT/playlists
https://www.youtube.com/user/MIT/playlists - here you will need to look for appropriate topics since they have a whole variety of subjects.

Hope this helps!

Just started A Level Maths...

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