10 Calculator Tricks YOU NEED Before your Maths Exam Save your Grades AQA Edexcel OCR

here are 10 calculator tips that you need before your GCSE calculator maths exam all of these tips will work mainly on these two calculators but any of the calculators that are allowed for GCSE should do the job so starting us off you can use your calculator to find the product of prime factors of any number that you want to let's say the question asks for the product of prime factors of 550. you would type 550 into your calculator hit equals and then we want to find the fact button on your calculator that will be shift followed by this button here and as you can see you get 2 times 5 squared times 11. and just to make sure you can do it again repeat it for some other numbers number two if you've done many past papers you have definitely seen one of these questions here your calculator can do all the hard work for you so what you're going to want to do is go ahead and press the menu button at the top right press the number three this will take you onto the table function so you want to go ahead and put in the equation that they're asking of you so let's use an example of 2x minus three you would press 2 and then alpha so find the on there on your calculator for most calculators this will be the close bracket or the right bracket and then minus three so it should say on your screen of equals 2x minus three then you will get the option to put in of normally we don't need that so just go ahead and press equals now you will get to screen where it says start end and step so start let's say minus two end two and step of one because it's going in increments of one now if you press equals again you will see you will get the values from minus two to two and the of values are those coordinates you go ahead and plot these coordinates and then you have your graph number three standard form conversions so using your calculator you can convert normal numbers into standard form and standard form back into normal numbers if we go ahead and just type 3.26 press the times 10x button and then press for example nine as you can see when you press equals it will put it into normal number for you however this unfortunately does not work with negative Powers so that is standard form converted into normal numbers but what about numbers into standard form if we go ahead and type in the value 6.5 million for example we press equals and then we press the Eng button the Eng button is located just above the seven or the eight on your calculator as you can see you get 6.5 times 10 to the 6. now the way this button works is it only does standard form values in multiples of three so times ten to the three times ten to the 6 and so on so if you have something like 650 000 instead and then press the Eng button notice it gives you 650 times 10 to the 3. so it will get you close and then from there you just have to adjust it to get it into the proper standard form number four simplifying fractions this is fairly straightforward one ninety over 160 put that into the calculator press equals and you get 9 over 16 for example this will work with any fraction I'm not going to waste your time you've probably seen this one before converting mixed numbers to improper fractions and vice versa so let's go with 54 over 5. if you press equals hit shift and the to button you get 10 and four fifths which is mixed number so if you go to put in new number press shift and then the fraction button and you put in six and five over seven and press equals it will automatically go 47 over 7 as an improper fraction now possibly one of the most useful ones on here let's say you have question that is relating speed distance and time you get your time as decimal that is never fun to deal with so let's say we get 6.55 hours what on Earth is 0.55 of an hour obviously you can work it out timesing it by 60 turning it into minutes stuff like that but there is button this button right here if you press equals it will turn it into the hours and the minutes and even the seconds if it requires it sometimes so 6.55 hours is 6 hours and 33 minutes now some of you may have noticed but on my calculator some of the longer numbers look very easy to read so the calculator actually splits up the number for me now the way do this go to shift and menu which takes me onto the setup if you go down to the bottom and hit number one you get the digit separator and then if you want to turn that on so you press one again and then it should be on so if go ahead and type in 4.5 million press equals you can see it spaces it out for me which makes it much easier to read converting ratios in the form of 1 to so some of you have probably seen this before convert the ratio 90 to 40 in the ratio 1 to so if you go ahead and go to menu and then press number four which takes you to the ratio if we want one to you would press number two so as we said 90 to 40. one to then the is where the should be and it will tell you what is and it is four to nine now some of you may find this easier than others but ratios can be quite complicated topic to some people so this is definitely useful thing to help you there now Point number nine you have probably found yourself you've written really long expression normally for things like the quadratic formula and you forget that you need to put in fraction rather than deleting the whole line putting the fraction back in and then having to rewrite it you can do this so let's say we have minus three plus or minus or just Plus in this case the square root of 64 add 20 and then you get to the point and you need to put that fraction in because you have over two on the bottom if you press the fraction button it will only capture the square root so what we want to do is you want to press the close bracket button or the right bracket and then do your fraction and then you do go have to go back and delete that bracket otherwise it won't work but it will save you lot of time compared to having to delete it and then rewrite the whole thing and finally Point number 10 you need to know how to store numbers into your calculator system so let's say you have to work out the value of the cube root of 65 multiplied by tan of 60 for example you get really long decimal you don't really want to write it out you're quite limited on space and time so what we can do is in your calculator if you go ahead and press the sto button or store button just above the seven on most calculators you will notice at the top there is little icon that gets highlighted if you go ahead and then press one of the letters that it can be saved under for example let's go with if we press equals it should have saved it under so what you can then do is you can do all your calculations that you need to do for the rest of the question and then let's say at the end you need to use that number again we can go and press Alpha and say squared and then add another so Alpha again so it looks something like this and we press equals and it will use that number as if it was just there before now something you can do is you press shift and that sto button again and you will get the recall button and as you can see it brings up all of the values of the letters that you have saved under certain number now one thing that is important you need to do before your exam is you need to clear all of that history because obviously you could find some way to cheat using that so what we're going to do is press shift and reset and then we want to press 2 because that's the memory and then equals to press yes and then if you press that recall button again you can see it's all reset to zero so you're okay for your exam and that was my top 10 tips to help you use your calculator as effectively as possible in your exam now good luck in the rest of your exams thank you for watching and hope this helped