Lesson 3

1. Lesson 3

Mathematics 20-1 Module 1

Module 1: Sequences and Series

Lesson 3: Arithmetic Series

Focus

Ever consider a career working in finance? Jobs in the finance industry involve working with money. You may know people who work with money, such as cashiers and bank tellers. However, many finance jobs do not involve actually handling bills and coins. In fact, most of the jobs in the finance industry help people or companies manage their money and make good decisions about how to spend or save their money.

This photo shows a young woman smiling and shaking the hand of her future employer at the end of a job interview.

You may think of accounting, financial counseling, or investment banking when discussing occupations related to finance, but there are many more occupations available that are both interesting and fulfilling. For example, you could be an appraiser, controller, or risk manager.

Before you get started on this lesson you may want to search the Internet to find out more about these jobs. Whatever job you accept, whether or not it's in the finance industry, you will want to know how much you get paid and how often you can expect to get a raise.

Some employees earn wages and others are salaried. Employers pay their employees biweekly, monthly, or as individual assignments are completed. For many companies, raises are applied at regular intervals; in other situations, raises may come infrequently and be based on performance.

In this lesson you will look for patterns that occur when the terms of an arithmetic sequence are added together. You will develop and learn to use methods and formulas to find sums efficiently.

Outcomes

At the end of this lesson you will be able to

derive a rule for determining the sum of n terms of an arithmetic series
determine t1, d, n, or Sn in a problem that involves an arithmetic series
solve a problem that involves an arithmetic series

Lesson Questions

You will investigate the following questions:

How are arithmetic sequences and arithmetic series similar and different?
How can you visualize the sum of an arithmetic series?

Assessment

Your assessment may be based on a combination of the following tasks:

completion of the Lesson 3 Assignment (Download the Lesson 3 Assignment and save it in your course folder now.)
course folder submissions from Try This and Share activities
additions to Module 1 Glossary Terms and Formula Sheet
work under Project Connection

Materials and Equipment

You will need scissors.