Linear sequences and finding the nth term

Practice this and other Maths GCSE questions over at my website: https://mathskitchen.com/questions/ti...

Linear sequences and finding the nth term

Whether you've recently covered this in a maths lesson and need a bit of extra help, are looking at it for the first or if you are using this to help you with your maths GCSE revision I hope you find this video useful.

If you're getting ready for your GCSE maths exams then this topic could appear in either the GCSE maths foundation or higher paper so is well worth practising as part of your Maths GCSE revision.

In this video we look at how to find what the nth term of a linear sequence is and how to use that to find out what any term in a sequence is. Linear sequences are simply ones that increases by the same amount each time.

If we had the sequence 11, 18, 25, 32, 39 what would be the nth term and what would be hundredth term in that sequence?

It’s a pretty straightforward process:

First you need to find out by how much the sequence is increasing each time. In the example above it increases by 7. That means the first part of the description would be 7n.

But 7n describes the 7 times table. This sequence is not the same as the 7 times table but it is similar; it is like the 7 times table all shifted on 4 places. Therefore, we describe this sequence as 7n+4.

I go through similar examples to this in the video as well as some slightly harder ones and giving you some practice questions to do.

Hope you find it useful - thanks for watching!

James, Maths Kitchen