Practice: Choosing a Route
These drills ask a different question than the rest of the course. They do not ask for a numeric answer. They ask which route, hand, handheld, Desmos, or hybrid, is the fastest reliable way to handle the situation described. Speed matters here: the goal is recognizing the right tool before you have spent any time solving, not after. None of these require actually working the problem out.
Use the signals from the previous lesson as your guide.
| Signal in the question | Route |
|---|---|
| Simple arithmetic or a short, visible algebraic step | Hand |
| Repeated arithmetic, trig, or statistics computation on known values | Handheld |
| Finding an intersection, a root, or a regression line; reading a graph's shape | Desmos |
| A word problem requiring translation before any calculation begins | Hybrid |
| A conceptual judgment (which theorem, what a study supports, rational or irrational) | Hand |
Remember that the ACT's embedded Desmos has no matrix mode, and that a calculator route that takes more keystrokes than the mathematics would take by hand has stopped doing its job.