Chapter 5 – Quadratics, Polynomials and Rational Expressions

This chapter covers the graphical, general, standard and root forms of a parabola, and the activities establish the connections between them. This leads to several approaches to the quadratic formula and finding roots of a quadratic polynomial, as well as several approaches to find the vertex of a parabola, a key step in optimization problems. The latter half of this chapter expands these ideas to general polynomials and then to rational expressions to build the basics of curve sketching techniques used in calculus.