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Algebra is not a chapter you can skip and make up elsewhere. It sits underneath every other chapter in the paper: a profit-and-loss sum becomes an equation, a time-and-work sum is an LCM in disguise, and every simplification question is algebra wearing arithmetic's clothes.
Yet algebra is where the most marks leak, and almost never because the algebra was hard. They leak at the order of operations. A student who knows (a+b)² perfectly still loses the mark by doing division before 'of', or by opening a bracket while a bar still sits over part of the expression.
So treat this as two separate skills. The first is procedural: knowing exactly what order to touch an expression in. The second is recognition: seeing that 127² + 73² + 2·127·73 is not a calculation at all — it is (127 + 73)², and the answer is 40,000 in one line. Timed papers reward the second skill far more than the first.
1. Simplify: 18 ÷ 6 of 3 × 2 + 4 − 1
2. If x + 1/x = 5, then x² + 1/x² equals:
3. The value of (√7 + √5) / (√7 − √5) is:
4. If a + b = 7 and ab = 12, then a³ + b³ is:
5. The value of (2⁵ × 2⁻³)² ÷ 2² is:
6. If a + b + c = 0, then a³ + b³ + c³ equals:
7. If x − 1/x = 3, then x³ − 1/x³ is:
8. The value of 127 × 127 + 73 × 73 + 2 × 127 × 73 is: