Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2019 / ii / Paper 1 / 25F / a / iii

The curve $C$ has dimension one. Its tangent has dimension one at every point except the origin and dimension two at the origin. By the smooth locus of a variety,and the origin is its unique singular point of an algebraic variety. Each reduced point component has dimension zero and zero-dimensional tangent space, so both $P$ and $Q$ are smooth on their respective components.