Often pupils don’t recognise quadratic equations”in the wild”. By that I mean, unless it is a page full of quadratics and they’ve been reminded about factoring and setting =0, they often, unsuccessfully, default to the approach for solving linear equation.

This task is designed to address that a little by mixing in some linear equations, quadratic equations, a cubic, and some linear equations which look quadratic but aren’t. Strategy selection is the name of the game. Interleaved practice of the two ideas.