To most students, it will surely be a big relief if Maths doesn’t come with any formulae at all. Ask any student and that will be the answer…for sure!!! It is not that the student doesn’t like formulae, but formulae comes in too many forms and it seems rather impossible to memorise it all. To those who have no ‘love affair’ with Maths…formulae has always been the reason, in other words, formulae is taboo to some….
Memorising formulae will never solve your problem, beside it being too many, we also need to memorise other things (far more important, depending on how you rate it yourself)…anniversary date, girlfriend/boyfriend’s date of birth, potential girfriend/boyfriend phone no and email addressess and many more…formulae is not welcome at all in our brain, not by a single-tiny percent…
If so, then how do we solve this formulae matter? Do we really need to think of it? Maybe…YES..since SPM is drawing near and for those who just cleared the PMR, you will be meeting more and more formulae in years to come.
My only solution is…try to understand the formulae. It helps me a lot those days and I’m pretty sure it will help you as well. For example, let us start with a simple Maths formulae….say, Surface Area of a cylinder. Observe the diagram below properly and you will find that a cylinder is in fact comprises of 2 segments;
- a circle as its base and top; and
- a rectangle/square as its body
From our observation on the above diagram, we could identify the followings:
- The Area and a circumference of a circle = πr2 and 2πr respectively
- The length of the rectangle/square is in fact the same with the circumference of the circle
- The breadth/width of the rectangle/square is the same with the height of the cylinder
- The Area of the rectangle/square will be 2πr x h (length x breadth/width)
As such, the total Surface Area of the cylinder can be calculated as follows:
AREA OF THE 2 CIRCLES + AREA OF THE RECTANGLE/SQUARE, that could also be written as : πr2 + πr2 + 2πrh = 2πr (r + h)
Try on other formulae as well, perhaps it could help you on how to apply basic and simple formulae for the harder ones without having to memorise it too much…after all, we need our brain for something else…