In part 2 of this book, we embark on an overview of calculus. Broadly speaking, calculus is the study of continuous change, so we talk a lot about how to measure rates of change of different quantities and what these rates of change can tell us.
In my opinion, calculus gets a bad rap as a difficult subject because of how much algebra is required, not because the concepts are unfamiliar. If you’ve ever owned or driven a car, you have an intuitive understanding of rates and cumulative values: a speedometer measures your rate of movement over time, while an odometer measures the cumulative miles driven. To some extent their measurements must agree. If your speedometer reads a higher value over a period of time, your odometer should increase by a larger amount, and vice versa.