wombat123 Posted August 1, 2011 Report Share Posted August 1, 2011 Has anyone tried the Cambridge and/or Pearson IB Math SL books? How are they? Do they give really good explanations? Math is probably my weakest subject, so I want to make sure I have a good textbook for next year. I know my school provides the Cambridge one, but since I'm pretty clueless at math should I buy the Pearson one too, just in case? I liked the Pearson chem HL book, and even though the Pearson bio HL has a lot of stuff you don't need to know, I find the explanations in those good too. Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sandwich Posted August 1, 2011 Report Share Posted August 1, 2011 I didn't use the Pearson one (I had them for Biology & Chemistry and really disliked all their additional content, I mean there's enough to have to learn in the IB without them overloading you with more! When other textbooks had better, more succinct explanations, I went for those xP) however I did have the Cambridge one for Maths SL. Personally, I like to have really clear explanations to look back on (because I forget the explanation almost instantaneously and have to have one to go back and refer to during cramming!) and didn't actually find the explanations in the Cambridge one all that great. It's quite low on explanation - or rather, their explanations require you to understand Maths concepts pretty quickly, because they're very sparse and not explained in detail (they assume you know/remember a lot of basics, notation etc.) and my poor little brain couldn't cope. I say little brain because I find the subject extremely hard so wanted a textbook to basically hold my hand! The one I did use which was a lot better was the Haese & Harris Maths SL textbook. Their explanations are actually quite clear and I found it possible to revise from most of them. A few I didn't understand still, but I got my teacher to explain those ones and overall found it a much better book. Also it had a tiny bit of colour and a few (not many though ) illustrations which somehow made it seem less intimidating. The only thing I didn't like about it was that they used some crazy difficult method involving circles for a lot of the trig/angle type stuff and as I couldn't get my head around the circles, the whole topic was utterly incomprehensible. Fortunately I found an alternative method somewhere else! Otherwise, though, all their stuff was really good, IMO 1 Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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