Polynomials

Something that stumped me this week was figuring with “method” to use for each polynomial question. I was mixing up product and sum, GCF, and double distributing.

During the lesson, we came up with questions as a “flow chart” to decipher which method to use:

If you can say yes to any of the questions, (in order) then you use the method given. If not, then you continue all the way down to the “ugly” polynomials that can only be determined with work.

All the methods up to “U” can be used to determine questions fairly quickly.

C- If the terms have something in common, we take it out as the GCF (by dividing) and then use this format: GCF (left over #’s that were divided)

D- If we have 2 conjugants, we simply multiply the first 2 terms and the last 2 terms to get the answer

P/E- If it is an easy pattern with an , an x and a #, we can solve it using PRODUCT & SUM.

U- If it is none of these, and has coefficients in front of the , we have to do work to solve it the long way. (factor list and check possibilities)

example for an ugly polynomial solving: