Euclid Contest Preparation

[endless]

Hey guys, i know there are many of us here waiting to be admitted for UWaterloo and will be writing the Euclid Math Contest whether it be for admission help, or scholarship chances. Anyway, thought i would create a thread where we could discuss problems and such to help each other.

Here is the Information for the contest (dates and such): http://cemc.math.uwaterloo.ca/contests/euclid.html
Euclid eWorkshop: http://cemc.math.uwaterloo.ca/contests/euclid_eWorkshop.html
Past Contests: http://cemc.math.uwaterloo.ca/contests/past_contests.html#euclid

By the looks of it, it looks a lot easier than the Sun Life Financial Canadian Open (in my opinion) since it is more math skills, less grinding/ problem solving on the spot.

So let the games begin.

I'll probably be back in a bit with some sequences and series questions since these are what i seem to need the most practice on.

[saltpro15]

the Canadian Open was brutal... I'm in gr10 and I wrote it this year, I scored 35/100

[Dark]

Yeah I hope I can get a 50% on the Euclid...lol.

Gonna have to start preparing after all my essays and such due by March Break

[jcollins1991]

saltpro15 @ Thu Feb 26, 2009 9:00 pm wrote:

the Canadian Open was brutal... I'm in gr10 and I wrote it this year, I scored 35/100

it was evil... i thought i did better than i did, so i guess i made some calculation errors somewhere...

Dark wrote:

Yeah I hope I can get a 50% on the Euclid...lol.

Gonna have to start preparing after all my essays and such due by March Break (

if you're in grade 12,(and are taking calc and vectors) you should be able to do most of the problems... looking over the past contests the only thing that i wouldn't be able to get is the data stuff, and i've borrowed someones notes to read (didn't take the course...)...

[A.J]

I wrote the euclid since grade 9...it is relatively easier than the open, I agree..

I got a 65 on the open this year and I am hoping to get >85 this year on the euclid...

the euclid is basically testing your knowledge on the school curriculum, thats why universities look at it a lot as opposed to other contests.

one main factor in doing well on the euclid (apart from actually solving the questions) is time management...making sure to split up the questions into chunks (for example, 1->4, 5-> 8 and 9 -> 10 is a good way of dividing the questions in to groups of increasing difficulty) and set a 'goal time' in which to finish each of them by.

doing the past contests really help, as they give you a feel of the contest's difficulty/formatting

a lot of people tend to write too much on the full solution questions (guilty as charged!) .....just show what is needed and don't elaborate...

as the contest approaches, Il'l try posting some good practice questions if people want any.


@saltpro15 do u mean 35/80 ? or 35% of 80?

[endless]

yea it seems like the data management stuff is the only stuff i haven't really seen before, so i will be focusing on the sequences and series eWorkshop to learn that stuff. also, it doesn't look like they test too much in calculus which is nice since we are just in calculus now.

[saltpro15]

was the open out of 80? I though it was 100, well either way I got 35 marks

[Insectoid]

Canadian open wasn't hard at all for me. The only questions I didn't get were the ones I hadn't been taught to do. For example, one of the questions was

there is a 4X4 grid. A token starts in the bottom right corner. It can move 1 place every 'turn' directions up or left, until it hits the top left corner or goes off the grid. What are the odds of it hitting the top left corner?

It was worded far better than what my terrible memory can recall, though a simple binary check will work. It takes 4 moves exactly to get to the end, 2 must be up, 2 must be left. so, if up = 1 and left = 0 it is easy to go through every possibility as long as you can count in binary.

0000
0001
0010
0011 -yes!
0100
0101 -yes!
0110 -yes!
0111
1000
1001 -yes!
1010 -yes!
1011
1100 -yes!
1101
1110
1111

6/16 = .375 = 37.5% chance.

[saltpro15]

I think i ended up with a 6/10 chance, but I rounded down to 3/5. damn

also most of the questions on part B were I think a little bit more advanced than gr9 math, which was all I had going in

[A.J]

insectoid wrote:

Canadian open wasn't hard at all for me. The only questions I didn't get were the ones I hadn't been taught to do.

For a lot of the contests, you don't get 'taught' it in high school at all! Like for example in the AMC, AIME, CMO, and even some questions on the Open, you have to teach yourself the material (well, mainly from past experience in writing these contests and practice)

[Insectoid]

well, for the open the ones I didn't get involved logarithms and such with words I don't even know that I know you learn in grade 12.

[Alexmula]

yea for the open challenge you had to know some theorem for the last question on part b that is not taught in high school... from where are we supposed to learn those theorems? :S

[A.J]

Alexmula wrote:

yea for the open challenge you had to know some theorem for the last question on part b that is not taught in high school... from where are we supposed to learn those theorems? S

not really...it was quite logical. and as for the theorems, you can't just memorize them....you have to grok them

[CodeMonkey2000]

insectoid @ Fri Feb 27, 2009 4:43 pm wrote:

there is a 4X4 grid. A token starts in the bottom right corner. It can move 1 place every 'turn' directions up or left, until it hits the top left corner or goes off the grid. What are the odds of it hitting the top left corner?

For all the CS kids; this is a DP problem

[saltpro15]

unfortunately, we can't code on the Open, would have made it far easier :p