Math 171 Lectures 1 and 2, Fall 2011 Wilson

Topics for second midterm exam

The exam is on Friday, November 4, at your usual lecture time. We have been given extra rooms so
that you can have a little more room than is available usually during lecture. The room assignments (in
the next paragraphs) are the same as for the first exam: If you did not take the regular first exam, be
sure you have located the correct room so that you dont go hunting for it at exam time!
11:00 lecture:
If you are in section 306, 307, 309, or 311, then you take the exam in room 19 Ingraham: Those are the
sections taught by Caitlin OConnell and Huanyu Wen. (Ingraham is the building behind Bascom and
between Van Vleck and Lake Mendota.)
If you are in section 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, or 312, then you take the exam in room B102 (our regular
lecture room). Those are the sections taught by Nicholas Moellman, Yun Su, Elnur Emrah, and Dan
Rosendorf.
2:25 Lecture:
If you are in section 322, 330, 332, or 333, then you take the exam in room B239 Van Vleck: Those are the
sections taught by Ke Zhang and Jie Zhao. (B239 VV is one floor below our lecture room, at the elevator
end of the long hall.)
If you are in section 323, 324, 325, 326, 327, or 328, then you take the exam in room B102 (our regular
lecture room). Those are the sections taught by Mir Asif Asgar, Dae Han Kang, and Yuan Wang.
I have the same comments on studying as last time so I wont write them out, but the essence is this:
Study the problems that were listed on the class schedule, for the sections on this exam (P5.3 through
C2.6 on that schedule), but be sure you understand how you work them rather than just finding a similar
example and changing the numbers.
You will have 50 minutes to complete the exam (if we allowed some to have more time we would have
to allow that for all, and some people have another class soon after ours).
You are allowed to use a calculator, including graphing calculators, but not a portable computer or a
smart phone or any other device that can browse the web. There are several things you can infer from
being allowed access to a calculator: (a) I will try to make the exam pretty calculator neutral, so that
someone with an expensive calculator has not bought much of an advantage over someone who does not
have that. (b) In grading we will be concentrating on your showing how you get your answers rather than
the numbers making up those answers. So be sure to show your work and to explain why you are doing
things. Dont put in lots of extra words just to make the answer longer, but do make clear what you are
doing.
You are allowed to bring in up to two note cards: They can be common 3 5 index cards, or you
could use a single piece of paper as large as half a sheet of notebook paper. On that card you can write
anything you want, you can computer print it in tiny letters, use both sides, what ever. . . . If I were doing
it, I would just put those things I was most worried about either forgetting or getting mixed up: The
definition of the limit might be good, but not a complete essay on how to use it! One of the reasons for
letting you have the note cards is that just making them is useful: It organizes your studying, and so can
be useful even if you dont refer to them during the exam. Here are some comments on the sections on the
exam.
P5.3
This is the section where we officially learned about the sin and cos functions: The preceding sections,
on the first exam, got us to measuring angles on the unit circle, using radians, and clearly you need
to know that in order to work with the trig functions we defined.

P5.4
Here we got four more trig functions, tan, cot, sec, and csc. For all six functions you should know
roughly what the graph looks like and be able to figure out (if you had not memorized) what the
domain and range are. You should know relations between them, e.g. cot() = cos()
sin() . And you
should know what signs each takes on in different quadrants.
P5.5
We skipped this section, and there wont be any questions on it. The reason I mention it here is to
distinguish how you may have defined and worked with trig functions in high school, only in triangles,
from what you need to know now. In our world, for example, sin(x) is defined for any number x, not
just those representing angles that can be found in a right triangle.
P5.6
First of all be sure you know what an identity is, an equation that has to be true no matter what
values you substitute for variables rather than an equation that is only true for some values. The
notation at the top of page P418 is used all the time so be sure you are fluent with it. There are some
identities listed here that just show how one function changes with specified changee in the variable,
e.g. the list on page P420, and there are others relating how a function changes when the variable
is changed by 2 or , e.g. page P421: Many of these can be deduced from knowing the graphs.
Others relate two or more functions, as on page P418. All are important.
C1.3
This is where the calculus book, in one section, does all of the trigonometry-related stuff we spent
several sections on in the other book. So there is a lot stuffed in here. But: (a) That makes it a
good study guide for the trigonometry material, and (b) Since our calculus content will come from
this book, this section summarizes what trigonometry we will be using for calculus.
The calc book treatment of trig is mostly consistent with what we had in the other book, but there
are additional items such as the period of a function. But we wont need the idea (page C27) of
a general sine function or sinusoid with anything like that detail: It is worth noting that many
functions behave like the sine, but we dont need more.
C2.1
Here we begin to get to the roots of calculus. This section introduces both average and instantaneous
rates of change of a function, in particular for the case where the function represents position of
an object and rate-of-change of position represents (average or instantaneous) speed or velocity:
Strictly speaking velocity is rate of change of position, which can be either positive or negative (you
can be moving forward or backward. . . ), while speed is always positive, the absolute value of velocity:
Remember that for classes in engineering or physics, but problems on our exam wont depend on
that difference.
Try to understand how the secant line and its slope relate to average rate of change, and how the
tangent line and its slope relate to instaneous rate of change! An understanding of that picture
can help with symbol manipulation and calculation. As part of that, realize that up to this point
the tangent line is a nice idea, but in general there is no way to find it.
You should be able to use limits (without /) to find the slope of the tangent line to a curve at a
given point, and to find an equation for that line. You wont be asked story problems where a
graph shows how far something has travelled and you would be asked how fast it was going.
C2.2
In 2.1 we found a need for limits, in finding instantaneous rate of change. 2.2 and 2.3 are a
two-step program for dealing with limits: In 2.2 we mostly talk intuitively, with some presumed
idea of what it means for one quantity to get close to another, and in 2.3 we finally make that
2

precise. The Limit Laws on page C49 are useful in both settings, since what we do in 2.3 is not
supposed to change what the limit is but just to refine the idea. Note how they are used in Example
5 on page 50, and how parts of that example are generalized in Theorems 2 and 3 on the same page.
You should be able to use the limit laws to explain why a limit has some value, if you are not asked
to justify it with s and s.
The process in Example 7 is very important, we will use if often, but dont assume all limits can be
evaluated this way. Lastly, remember The Sandwich Theorem, Theorem 4, as well as Theorem 5.
C2.3
Here we come to the crunch: I am sure more students are worried, even in panic, about the -
definition of the limit than any other ten things in the course! You definitely should (a) know what
the definition says and (b) be able to carry it out for a simple case. As we saw in class, and as the
books examples show, it is very easy to make a problem where thinking out how to pick to go
with  is complicated and then showing the chosen fits the definition is also complicated: Such a
problem would take far too much time and effort to be a problem on our exam. I will soon post at
our class website an example of a show that the - definition of lim f (x) = L is satisfied problem
xc
that I would consider reasonable, and of course any easier problem should also be possible.
C2.4
You need to be able to find one-sided limits, but I wont ask an - question for the one-sided case.
sin
1 cos
You should definitely know what the limits lim
and lim
that appear on page C70 are,
0
0

but I wont ask you to prove them.

C2.5
You should (a) know the definition of continuity and (b) know what kinds of bad behaviour it is
supposed to rule out (see Figure 2.40). You should know the properties in the list on page C76, that
come immediately from the limit laws learned earlier, as well as Theorem 9 about continuity of the
composition of functions: You should be able to use these tools, together with continuity of f (x) = x
and f (x) = k at any c, to show that a function is continuous at some point.
You should be able to deal with a removable discontinuity, what the book on page C79 calls
Continuous Extension to a Point, as in Example 10, and you should know and be able to use the
Intermediate Value Theorem for Continuous Functions (see Example 12).
C2.6
You should know what it means to change lim = L by replacing the number c, or the number L,
xc
or both, by , +, or . I wont ask you to do a careful proof with these but you should know
P (x)
how to find such limits, particularly for rational functions Q(x)
. I will not ask about asymptotes
or dominant terms.