
# PrefaceFeatures of the Text

Instructors and students alike will find several consistent features in the presentation, including:

Motivating Questions

At the start of each section, we list 2–3 motivating questions that provide motivation for why the following material is of interest to us. One goal of each section is to answer each of the motivating questions.

Preview Activities

Each section of the text begins with a short introduction, followed by a preview activity. This brief reading and the preview activity are designed to foreshadow the upcoming ideas in the remainder of the section; both the reading and preview activity are intended to be accessible to students in advance of class, and indeed to be completed by students before a day on which a particular section is to be considered.

Activities

A typical section in the text has three activities. These are designed to engage students in an inquiry-based style that encourages them to construct solutions to key examples on their own, working individually or in small groups.

Exercises

There are dozens of calculus texts with (collectively) tens of thousands of exercises. Rather than repeat standard and routine exercises in this text, we recommend the use of WeBWorK with its access to the Open Problem Library and around 20,000 calculus problems. In this text, each section includes a small number of anonymous WeBWorK exercises, as well as 3–4 challenging problems per section. The WeBWorK exercises are best completed in the .html version of the text. Almost every non- WeBWorK problem has multiple parts, requires the student to connect several key ideas, and expects that the student will do at least a modest amount of writing to answer the questions and explain their findings. For instructors interested in a more conventional source of exercises, consider the freely available APEX Calculus text by Greg Hartmann et al., available from www.apexcalculus.com.

Graphics

As much as possible, we strive to demonstrate key fundamental ideas visually, and to encourage students to do the same. Throughout the text, we use full-color 1 To keep cost low, the graphics in the print-on-demand version are in black and white. When the text itself refers to color in images, one needs to view the .html or .pdf electronically.graphics to exemplify and magnify key ideas, and to use this graphical perspective alongside both numerical and algebraic representations of calculus.