C1 Advice

Hmmm.

I was bored so I thought I'd offer a little advice for anyone revising for C1. As it is a non-calculator paper, you need to consider a few things.

1) Your mental arithmetic should be good
2) You should know square and cube numbers up to and including 5³
3) You should be totally au fait handling surds. This is an early part of C1 and you might have forgotten it by the time of the exam. There are some fiddly rules surrounding eliminating surds from equations so learn 'em.
4) You should remember to x stuff by -1 to get rid of unwanted negative numbers in your answers.
5) You need to be good at fractions, including cancelling down.
6) You also should be confident expanding brackets (and other GCSE stuff). This might be annoying if you did GCSE some years ago, like myself. It's worth buying a GCSE revision textbook and looking the Higher level stuff up.
7) Because of the non-calculator thing, the answers to C1 questions are generally nice, like 3 and 5 and 2. If you work something out not in surd form and it is a bizarre fraction a good rule of thumb is to go back and check your working.