Today is the last day of the Fall semester and it is our final exam day.

If your kid is unable to come to school today, you can download the exam below. Have him/her do it at home. This is a close-book exam, with one hour and 20 minutes.

http://blog.newtonchineseschool.org/wangweidong/files/2012/01/Math-7-Fall-Final-Exam-2012.pdf

We started Chapter 10 with polynomials today and we covered polynomial addition, substraction, and multiplication.

For adding and substracting two polynomials, it is important to add/substract the same degree terms. For multiplying two polynomials, one uses the distributive property and multiplies each term out. For multiplying two binomials, there is an easy way to help student remember: FOIL, which refers to the First terms, the Outer terms, the Inner terms, and the Last terms:

(ax + b)(cx + d) = acx^2 + adx + bcx + bd

There are some special products of polynomials that students should memorize:

(a + b)(a – b) = a^2 – b^2

(a +/- b)^2 = a^2 +/- 2ab + b^2

For home work, visit the following link:

http://blog.newtonchineseschool.org/wangweidong/files/2012/01/Math7_Fall_HW_L14.pdf

We went over word problems for quadratic function/equation.

There are severla types of such problems:

• Questions with area
• Questions with droppoing/throwing object in the air
• Questions with maximum/minimum values
• Questions with right triangles
• Questions with consecutive numbers

In all cases, we need to read carefully from the question, gather the givens, draw a picture to help us understand the problem, label the unknown, and write out equations. Then solving it should be easier as we can always use the formulae to do so.

We went over several such problems in the classroom together. For the homework (below), finish them all.

http://blog.newtonchineseschool.org/wangweidong/files/2012/01/Quadratic-Equation-Word-Problems.pdf