Maths for Science

Volume

Volumes can puzzle people. The best solution is to get out and actually measure some volumes using the litre jug in your house. Make a cake or some recipe that involves measuring out the correct volumes. Pancakes need a certain volume of milk in them. Sauce mixes from packets usually need you to add some water. 
Have a look at these worksheets I made up for somebody who didn't like working with volumes ! They might help you to understand more about how litres and cm3 relate to each other.

Now try these two :
A quick way to convert from cm3 to litres is to divide by 1000.
So to put 25cm3 into litres you would divide 25/1000 to get 0.025 litres.

Cross Multiplying

This is really useful in Biology and Chemistry or indeed anywhere !
Reading from Graphs
Still to do - but something a lot of people seem to struggle with.


Percentage Increase and Decrease

To work out the value for a percentage increase or decrease, you need the starting value and the end value. Then use this formula. It works for a percentage increase or decrease !



Symmetry is very important in Biology
Here are some examples - see what ones you can spot
and they also mention here a Fibonacci sequence - quite complex maths which explains some quite complex patterns spotted in Biology http://listverse.com/2013/04/21/10-beautiful-examples-of-symmetry-in-nature/


Index Notation
This comes up in all the courses so if you are not sure about why 0.1 is written as 1 x 10-1 then click here http://www.mathsisfun.com/index-notation-powers.html


SI Units
You should know about the SI units of measurement and mass - here is an explanation :
The Système International d'Unités (SI), is the list of units which measurements are based on in the metric system and which are used by scientists to have a standard when carrying out experiments.

For example the basic unit of length that is used is metres (m), time is measured in seconds (s), mass has a base unit of kilograms (kg), thermodynamic temperature is measured in kelvins (K),  amount of substance is taken as the mole (mol).


This video may help you to change units :

Here is another useful resource - "How to use your Casio Scientific Calculator" - useful if you haven't been shown at school - also make sure you know what the dot means eg if you divide 1 by 3 the answer should be 1.333333 ... etc recurring - but you will see this on your screen as 1.3 with a dot above the 3 ... it means it recurs or repeats ...


CROSS MULTIPLYING !!
If you don't know how to do this, print this out - its useful for all the calculations in Unit 1 or just useful anyway if you can get the hang of this !