Mental Maths Book for Class 10

Preparing for the CREST Mental Maths Olympiad (CMMO) in a board-exam year? The Mental Maths book for Class 10 keeps practice focused, and you can order it as a colour PDF or a printed book from the Olympiad books page.

It is written to the seven-topic Class 10 syllabus:

1. Number System
2. Algebra
3. Comparing Quantities
4. Geometry
5. Mensuration
6. Playing with Numbers
7. Data Handling

What is in the Class 10 Mental Maths book?

Class 9 had exactly this list too. For Class 10, two topics hold most of the detail. Comparing Quantities takes in time and distance, simple and compound interest, profit and loss, problems on ages, time and work, boats and streams, averages, percentages, partnership and ratio. Mensuration covers the surface area and volume of cubes, cuboids, cylinders and cones, heights and distance, and areas of triangles, quadrilaterals and circles. The book is the same combined Class 9 and 10 workbook that Class 9 students use: a chapter of practice questions for each topic, then a CREST previous year paper and the answer key.

How can a Class 10 student use it?

With board exams in the same year, keep sessions short and regular; twenty minutes a day is enough to hold your speed. The CMMO paper is 100 questions in an hour, and many of them reward a trick, such as finding still-water speed as the average of the upstream and downstream speeds, or taking pi as 22/7.

Not sure about the level? Two free resources answer that. The Class 10 Mental Maths sample papers ask things like the value of -4x^2 + 7x - 5 when x = -3, or the area of a circle whose circumference is 176 m, and the Class 10 Mental Maths reading material gives notes on every sub-topic.