Dear Parent/Student:

Today we first went over the exponential functions again as some students found that part of the homework difficult. We then continued our Exponents study with section 8.3 and 8.4. We further talked abut the division properties of exponents:

a^m / a^n = a ^ (m-n), a <> 0 and

(a / b)^m = a^m / b^m, b <> 0

We did some exercises on simplifying expressions with exponents. I think students are still not good at dealing with negative exponents and how to make a negative exponents positive with: (a /b) ^ (-m) = (b / a)^m. This takes practice to get better.

We then talked about scientific notation where a positive number can be represented as C*10^n, where 1<= C < 10, and n is an integer. We talked about how to convert from a decimal number to a scientific notation number and vice versa, how to do multiplication and division with scientific numbers.

Below is this week’s homework:

http://blog.newtonchineseschool.org/wangweidong/files/2011/10/Math7_Fall_HW_L5.pdf