Introduction

I hope that as you work throught his book you will gain several things:

• an understanding of the value of being a numerate person,
• a confidence in handling facts, figures and those pesky statistics,
• and an enjoyment in learning more about the world we live in.

Why Core Maths?

It is a good question! As the world has become more technological it has brought great benefits, think of a single day in your life. You woke up and enjoyed a hot cup of tea or coffee without having to first clear out the fireplace or blow on embers to get the fire going! Whereas your ancestors gathered wood or mined coal for their energy needs you just flick a switch and electricity is there for you (lucky you!). The vast networks that balance the power load, spin up power stations at peak load times, transform voltages and span the county are basically invisible to you. They are just there available and always on. But the changes that they have brought to our society have been immeasurable - the hours your ancestors spent lighting fires can now be spent relaxing, or working in other ways. It’s not just the kettle, but the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, the hot water tank, the lights and any number of labour saving devices have been freeing up time year on year. That time has been a precious gift, a gift that has led inexorably to progress in our societies.

With the advent of widespread computing we have reached a new level of progress. Suddenly we are surrounded by a world of information, what once would have taken us days to dig out of the library is now almost instantly accessible. Options to share your creative works abound with new online technologies. We can gain access to more official statistics than ever before.

What does this mean for you? It means simply that you need to be numerate. Since the 1800’s we have enjoyed the benefits of a literacy revolution through an educated and politically engaged populace, today we are beginning to see the need for a numeracy revolution. It isn’t enough any more to merely pass your GCSE maths qualification, you need to be able to go beyond that and be able to apply those skills in the real world.

We have in the workplace unprecedented demand for students who can “do numbers”, and this doesn’t just mean financial literacy, although it does mean that. To be able to “do numbers” means that your boss can give you the sales records for the past three years from five different stores and ask you which one to close and which one to invest more in. This isn’t the maths you are used to! It requires argument and interpretation, decision making and justification.

What is Core Maths?

Core Maths is a generic name for a suite of qualifications all issued by different boards to meet the Core Maths Standards. This book will address the OCR/MEI Level 3 Certificate in Quantitative Problem Solving, catchy title huh? The government have decided that this qualification is an AS level equivalent qualification and so it carries UCAS points equal to those of an AS. Many Many univeristies have endorsed this qualification but at the time of writing no university currentlyr equires it as a prerequisite as they cannot guarantee that every school is running it.

Core Maths is designed as far as possible to be embedded in real world contexts, this means that questions covered always arise from real world data and problems. You won’t have questions whose answers are all round numbers, this is real world maths and the real world is actually a bit messy. This course involves quite a lot of statistics. Why? Statistics is probably the single most useful area of maths available for those of us who need to use maths in the real world outside of the scientific field. Businesses use Statistics all the time as so Social Scientists, Biologists and Geographers to name but a few. Statistics is essentially the science of inference from the real world. We know there is a fact out there such as the precise proportion of people who love buttered popcorn but we don’t have the time or the money to ask everyone in the country, instead we take a carefully chosen sample and ask them instead. Are those results any good or are they just rubbish? how far can we trust and rely on the results of that survey? This is statistics.