Customer Reviews

Pure Mathematics 1 (International) (Cambridge International Examinations)

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I have to address some of the issues from previous reviewers who seem to be rather americo-centric in their assessments. Let me first state my credentials. I am a mathematics teacher of 15 years, of which 7 years has been in the United States and 8 years in England. The AICE curriculum is the Advanced International Certicificate of Education which is the award equivalent to the AS and A level exams as undertaken by students in the United Kingdom. The course is to provide qualifications recognised in countries outside the United States. Also with a new law passed in 2011 these courses are now recognised within all Virginia Universities too.

As for the language issue, this course is written in British English because it stems from Cambridge University which is in....England. If you cannot figure out a few words such as modulus from the context and the examples given then you shouldn't be doing this high level course anyways.

In the 2001 edition there are some errors but these have been largely fixed in later editions. I personally don't mind an occasional error as any student who is copying (using the answers from the back) will get caught out as their answer does not make sense.

This book is invaluable for the AICE course, the type of question asked and the content covered is very different from the AP calculus course and trying to use this book for that type of course will not work. Similarly don't try using an AP Calculus book if you are doing the Cambridge course. Of particular value is the questions in the Miscellaneous sections which are exam style questions. The ones with (OCR) after them are actual previous exam questions and therefore practising these is vital.

As with most things the book by itself is nowhere near as valuable as when in used in tandem with the teacher. This book is an excellent resource when used correctly, the curriculum for the AICE course is covered by this book and the Pure Mathematics 2&3 edition.

If you are doing the A level make sure you can do all of the material in these 2 books, use the miscellaneous exercises and the review exercises too.

This is the worst book I've used for Pre-Calc/Analytical Geometry. Although a good number of years ago, I've had many years of Calculus an obtained a degree in electrical engineering. My son is having to use this book for his 11th grade class and it's no wonder he's lost as I'm even lost. Loads and loads of exercises with almost no explanation and examples of working these types of problems. I've gone back to my 30 year old Calculus books and have been helping him from those.

If this is how these guys write their text book, it'd be scary sitting in their class and hoping to learn something

Honestly, this book is pretty good among other textbooks. It can be wordy some times but I have seen worse. Some examples have some errors but I can overlook them. I used this book to refresh my memory. I am not a student.

I am writing this review from the perspective of a teacher.(I use it in my class.)

Bad points:

1. This book has *lots* of mistakes in the worked problems. Fortunately the problems are simple enough that correcting the mistakes doesn't take that much time. And there are enough mistakes in the book (averaging about one per subsection) that the kids and I can have fun going back and one by one proving that that problem is wrong and even trying to take guesses at where the authors could have made their mistake.

2. There are also no errata anywhere on the internet against which I could verify the problems that I have found to be wrong are, in fact, wrong and have been found by others so to be.

3. Some of the terminology in the book is a bit bizarre. "Modulus"? As if we had never heard of "absolute value"? "Surd"? as if we had never heard of "irrational number"? "Gradient"? As if we've never heard of "slope"? I'm not sure for whom the vocabulary was intended, but we could have at least taken account of American readers who might not be familiar with said terms.

Good points:

1. The book has been out long enough that it is very cheap and can be bought used.

2. The authors keep the text light (and paperback) with stripped down chapter and without a bunch of pretty colors. (How many textbooks have I seen that go overboard with trying to make the book look nice instead of pedagogically sound?)

3. Every single problem is worked, and that gives plenty of chances for the students to check their work against the answer given in the back of the book (which is right much of the time).

I'd recommend this for an advanced high school class-- or even a remedial university class.