Mathematics A Level (Farnham)

What you'll learn

We follow the AQA specification, your previous body could have been with any of the awarding bodies.

During the two years you will study:

• Pure Mathematics
• Mechanics
• Statistics

The Pure Mathematics topics on the first year, will develop your GCSE skills in algebra, trigonometry, and co-ordinate geometry and introduces some calculus techniques. They also provide the basis for the applications you will study in the Mechanics and the Statistics topics. The second year Pure Mathematics topics will extend your knowledge on the topics covered earlier in the course and there will be some new skills introduced and developed.

At a higher level, Mathematics is all about applying your knowledge to real life situations, so an interest in solving problems and puzzles is very useful. You need to be logical so that you can follow a mathematical argument, and creative so that you can look for different ways of applying your skills.

Mechanics is essentially the study of moving bodies. If you study A Level Physics or you studied Physics in your GCSE you will have covered some of the material in this topic, but the approach will be different, with more of an emphasis on problem solving.

The Statistics topic extends the statistical techniques that you studied at GCSE like probability, averages and introduces some new ideas about correlation between variables, statistical distributions and hypothesis testing.