The focus of Calculus for Business, Economics, and the Social and Life Sciences, Seventh Edition has been improved by eliminating subjects generally viewed as unnecessary to the intended audience. Using extensive reviewer feedback, the following chapters and topics from the sixth edition have been deleted or reduced to create a more streamlined and accessible text. (See the Table of Contents page for more information about coverage changes.)

Chapter 8, Sequences and Series, and Chapter 9, Trigonometric Functions, of the sixth edition have been removed from the seventh edition. (For individuals who need this material, it may still be obtained from McGraw-Hill in a customized format. Please consult with your McGraw-Hill representative for more details.)

Integration by tables, numerical integration, and L'Hopital's rule no longer appear in the text. These topics were viewed by the reviewer panel as unnecessary for business calculus students, especially for those with access to computers or calculators.

The chain rule for partial derivatives has also been deleted. There is no question that this topic is of great value for economics majors, but it was the almost unanimous opinion of the reviewing panel that its inclusion, even as an optional section, tends to disrupt the focus of the chapter on functions of several variables (Chapter 7).

The method of least squares now appears as an example in the section on optimizing functions of several variables (Chapter 7, Section 3). Purely computational aspects of least-squares approximation are illustrated in a single example and appear in a few exercises, but are not strongly emphasized.

Probability density functions, which is an important application of calculus, especially for life science majors, is now introduced as a subtopic in the section on improper integrals (Chapter 6, Section 4) and joint density functions is covered as an application of double integrals (Chapter 7, Section 5).