# Browsing category core 1

## Brutal simultaneous equations

I recently became aware of the IYGB papers, available from Madas Maths. Like the Solomon papers, they're intended to stretch you a bit -- they're ranked by difficulty from standard to extremely hard. My student, being my student, demanded we go through one of the extremely hard ones. There were

Dear Uncle Colin, I'm having trouble getting my head around sum notation! I can't tell whether $\sum_{n=0}^{6}{5}$ means $0\times5 + 1\times 5 + ... + 6\times 5$ or $0 + 1 + 2 + ... + 6$ or $5 + 5 + 5 ... + 5$. Wolfram|Alpha just gives me

## The C1 Last-Minute Panic Checklist

OK, OK, stop screaming! I KNOW C1 is only a few days away, I know you're underprepared, but panicking isn't going to help anything. It's a pretty common - and heartbreaking - thing for tutors and teachers to see: a student who's waltzed through GCSE getting to the end of

## Dealing with nasty powers

There's nearly always a question on the non-calculator GCSE paper about Nasty Powers. I'm not talking about the Evil Empire or anything, I just mean powers that aren't nice - we can all deal with positive integer powers, it's the zeros, the negatives and the fractions that get us down.