I once again did not have a very productive week on KA. 👎🏼 I made it through the eighth and nineth unit tests of Algebra 1 but that was it. Neither of them were difficult, so I should have gotten more done than that. It took me until Saturday to get through the first unit test partly because I kept misunderstanding what the questions were asking and would get them wrong, and partly because, after that, I would be annoyed and give up after only ~20 minutes on KA. So, it was a disappointing week but I’m happy that I’m now close to finishing off Algebra 1. I’ll likely be able to get through it by the end of next week, so I’ve got that going for me which is nice.
Here are four questions are from the first unit test, Unit 8, Functions:
Question 1
As you can see from my notes, I didn’t use the same notation or solve this question the same way that KA did, but I knew what I was doing. It was pretty obvious that I needed to figure out the slope between first and second point, and the second and third point to determine which one was steeper meaning I had to use the good-old m = (y2 – y1)/ (x2 – x1). Pretty straightforward.
Question 2
I remembered that to figure out a function’s inverse you write out the function, switch the variables, and then use algebra to set the equation in terms of ‘y’. Once again, not very difficult.
Question 3
Here’s an example of a question that I didn’t read carefully enough. To be fair, I’m rusty with function terminology like “domain” and “range”, but I definitely knew what both of those terms meant before getting this question wrong. In any case, I read the question too quickly and switched the domain and range in my head and thought that the domain was distance between each step and the range was the number of steps. I was annoyed that I got this question wrong and had to start the entire unit test over, but it was helpful to remind me that when you see h(n), that’s referring to ‘y’ and the range.
Question 4
I ended up getting this question correct but was pretty confused as I worked through it. Again, I had a hard time deciphering what the question was actually saying. My understanding is that the y-axis on the graph would range from 0 to 3 and the function would run horizontally and look like a step function across the x-axis and jump between 0, 1, 2, and 3 depending on which building it was at a given ‘n’. Anyways, I got it correct because I’m a gangster. 🔫
Like I said, it took me until Saturday to get through this first unit test. I had to redo it four or five times. On Sunday morning I started the unit test for the nineth unit, Sequences, and finished it in about 45 minutes. Here are five questions from the test:
Question 5
This was the first question I did. It took me about five minutes to think it through but I eventually figured out the formula. Part of me vaguely remembered the formula for this type of sequence, but I mostly just thought through the fact that I’d need to multiply 3 by 5 but that the first value needed to stay as three. It took me about five minutes to figure out that in order to keep the first value as 3, I’d need to raise 5 by (n – 1).
Question 6
The only reason why I took a screenshot of this question was to show how simple the math was on this test. 🙃
Question 7
Again, just had to do some basic multiplication in my head to figure out the formula for this sequence. It took me approximately 2.34 seconds.
Question 8
It took me about 30-seconds to think through the formula for this question.
Question 9
(INSERT SCREENSHOT)
This was another pretty straightforward question. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to come up with a formula to solve it and it seemed easier to just find the second and third value of c(n). Based on how KA solved it, I’m pretty sure was the best way to do it.
And that was it… Nothing crazy but progress, nonetheless. There’s only one unit left in Algebra 1 that I need to do, Unit 14, Quadratic Functions & Equations. Unlike the other units, there are four exercises I need to do before I can start the unit test. 🤔 I also just realized that the unit test itself is 25 questions so, on second thought, it might tough for me to finish off this unit this coming week. I’m going to try but if I only get through the exercises, I’d be ok with that. That said, as usual fingers crossed that I can make some decent progress this coming week! 🤞🏼