The most appalling text book I have ever come across.
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Handle with care! Contains a lot of superfluous material! Do not get bogged down trying to understand the explanations. Having a go at a question before reading the explanation in full is sometimes a good idea.
I am not claiming to be a statistics genius, but I could re-write this book in about a third of the pages. The book makes this extremely easy topic very difficult and studying statistics on your own using it as your stand alone textbook is not a good idea.
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+ Detailed, thorough and a HUGE range of questions. - Confused, irrelevant material and *some* difficult explanations
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This book offers a real mixed bag.
On the one hand, examples are usually very detailed, each of the topics is developed to the required depth and a *huge* range of practice and exam level questions are given.
Unfortunately, this is where the positives end. The book is very confused, and a significant minority of examples are extremely difficult to follow. Some of the stated methods are *very* complicated compared to what is required, and irrelevant material NOT required for the S1 exam is provided. In most cases, the distinction between what is needed and what isn't is not clear. Finally, there are several mistakes in the answers section.
Unfortunately, there is not a massive amount of choice regarding Edexcel S1 learning resources. I would recommend Cambridge's SMP S1 book even less, and for want of a better book, this may actually be the best option.
Despite the problems, this book led to me (an average maths student) scoring 100/100 on the S1 unit examination.
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Too Complex for something very simple
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This is a terrible book, i didn't understand any of the explanations and only got a good grade because of a revision guide. It makes it more complex than it needs to be!!!
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Confused, jumbled and unhelpful
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This book fails to make key points explicitly or clearly, uses symbols and terminology without proper exaplanation or justication, and the answers to the exercises are riddled with errors. Further, many of the explanations in the book are written in pieces of block-prose, perhaps more suitable for a history text-book. I also agree with the other review of this item: the pure mathematics text-books in this series are much better than the statistics ones. Since this text-book is the only one available for this exam, I would humbly adivse you to treat it with caution, and to make sure that you go through all the topics covered with a teacher.
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Is it the book you want?
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Like the mechanics series, the statistics branch lacks the precise, structured exercises we saw in the Pure books. In the S1 book explanations were slightly hard to follow when steps were jumped. Special symbols were sometimes put in but not explained. On the whole I would think that more explanations will be needed for harder statistics questions, but not just 'take it for granted' steps jumping sample solutions.
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