High School Contest Books
Excellent practice for the SAT!
These books gives classes, clubs, teams, and individuals diversified collections of high school math problems. All of these contests were used in regional interscholastic competition throughout the United States and Canada. Each contest was taken by about 80,000 students. In the contest section, each page contains a complete contest that can be worked during a 30-minute period. The convenient format makes this book easy to use in a class, a math club, or for just plain fun. In addition, detailed solutions for each contest also appear on a single page.
Every contest has questions from different areas of mathematics. The goal is to encourage interest in mathematics through solving worthwhile problems. Many students first develop an interest in mathematics through problem-solving activities, such as working these contests. On each contest, the last two questions are generally more difficult than the first four. The final question on each contest is intended to challenge the very best mathematics students. The problems require no mathematical knowledge beyond secondary school mathematics. Knowledge of calculus is not required to solve any of these problems. Two to four of the questions on each contest only require a knowledge of elementary algebra. Starting with the 1992-93 school year, students have been permitted to use any calculator on any of our contests.
There are 6 volumes for Math Contests-High School. Publication date for Volume 5 is June, 2006.
Volume 1 contains the contests given in the school years 1977-78 through 1981-82.
Volume 2 contains the contests given in the school years 1982-83 through 1990-91.
Volume 3 contains the contests given in the school years 1991-92 through 1995-96.
Volume 4 contains the contests given in the school years 1996-97 through 2000-01.
Volume 5 contains the contests given in the school years 2001-02 through 2005-06.
Volume 6 contains the contests given in the school years 2006-07 through 2010-11.
Each book is divided into four sections for ease of use by both students and teachers. The first section of each book contains the contests. Each contest contains six questions that can be worked in a 30-minute period. The second section of each book contains detailed solutions to all the contests. Often, several solutions are given for a problem. Where appropriate, notes about interesting aspects of a problem are mentioned on the solutions page. The third section of each book lists answers to each contest question. The last section of each book contains the difficulty rating percentages for each question. These percentages (based on actual student performance on these contests) determine the relative difficulty of each question.
You may prefer to consult the answer section rather than the solution section when first reviewing a contest. The authors believe that reworking a problem when the answer (but not the solution) is known often helps to better understand problem-solving techniques.