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Dear Student:

This book is intended for those of you who wish to satisfy your quantitative reasoning

graduation requirement with a mathematics-based course featuring content which will prove

useful to you, both personally and professionally. As the course progresses, you will find that

every section of the book requires critical thinking and the ability to use some of the earlier

parts of the course. The structure of the book will provide prompts for this prior knowledge

and there will be support throughout the book for the improvement of your skill in learning

mathematics.

In this course, you will find yourself asking questions of yourself, your fellow students, and

your instructor. No one, including your instructor, will always have an appropriate answer

ready. That does not mean that your instructor is unprepared; on the contrary, it indicates

the level of critical thinking and problem solving you are using. The work (and occasional

struggle) required to arrive at answers is the most productive part of this course — that is

where the greatest degree of learning and growth occurs. So expect to feel frustrated and to be

challenged to think your way to your own answers. Your instructor is available to help you,

but not to offer easy answers. Because the course covers a variety of real world problems that

require mathematical thinking to resolve but from a variety of disciplines (finance, statistics,

business, data analysis, graphical display and analysis, the health sciences, etc.), there is no

canned set of answers that all instructors have. You have probably rarely heard an educator

say, “I don’t know,” in response to a student’s question. Prepare yourself; that will likely

happen often in this course. “I don’t know” is an excellent first step and clears the way for,

“Let’s figure it out and learn.”

You are expected to seek out information from the world wide web in order to complete tasks

for most sections of the book. Often you will be prompted to do this, other times you will

not, especially in the later chapters. A world’s worth of information is available to you via

the Internet; given such a resource and that your access to it began long before this course

and will continue long afterward, it is only natural that you should be responsible for your

own learning and knowledge development. Each section of the book contains tools to help

you learn to master your own learning, from prompts for prior knowledge, guided discovery

activities, creating the hardest problem you can, and troubleshooting others’ work.

We have created this book with the intention of actually improving your ability to learn

mathematics. It is also our goal to help you become a self-motivated learner with ever-

increasing intellectual skills. We trust that the journey through this book and course, though

sometimes frustrating and confusing, will be valuable and rewarding.

Any time you see the icon at left, you will need to access the companion website for

Quantitative Reasoning and Problem Solving:

www.pcrest.com/qrps