Prerequisite Skills and Knowledge

There are certain essential skills that your teacher will assume that you are proficient in when you start the course. Your teacher may have some time to assist you with this, but you will have a far smoother start to the course and have less stress if you already know all the essential prerequisite topics very well.

This is important because your teacher will try their best to explain difficult maths to you, but you can only understand this if you are confident with the small steps. You will not be able to follow the explanation if you stumble at a prerequisite step. It is also advisable to get used to your GDC.

Go through the below table and check you understand everything before you start the course. Good luck!

Topic	Video/Playlist	Practice	Notes
Trigonometry	Trigonometry Playlist Sin, Cos and Tan Graphs	Pythagoras Practice SOHCAHTOA Finding Lengths Find Angles	You must know Pythagoras Theorem and SOHCAHTOA. Knowing the Sine Rule and Cosine Rule already will definitely help.
Algebra Skills	Algebra Basics	Changing the Subject of a Formula Solving Harder Equations	Key Ideas: 1. Simplifying Expressions 2. Solving Equations 3. Solving Hard Equations (including square roots) 4. Factoring and Expanding Brackets 5. Forming Equations from Real World Scenarios
Straight Line Graphs	Straight Line Graphs Playlist	Equation of a Line	This topic is a big deal. Straight Line Graphs are a foundation for many key topics in IB Maths. Spend some time perfecting this before you begin the course.
Statistics	Statistics Playlist	Probability Questions Probability Trees	The will be a lot of chapters on probability and statistics in the IB A&I SL course.

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