This week we had our unit test for exponents. Although we didn’t really get taught anything new, I did learn/realize something. For a question that has a negative fractional 4exponent, I was often confused which law to start with. Some people started with the negative law and others with the fractional law. For some reason, I thought you could only start with one rule, which often confused me when trying to answer the question. This always frustrated me but after trying them both out, I had a “aha” moment and it finally clicked that I could do either and still get the right answer.

To do option A which starts with the fractional exponent law, we must follow the flower power rule that I wrote about last week. So, is . Next, follow the negative exponent law and put that into a fraction to make it positive. So,   equals . Our final answer is .

Now trying it out with option B which has us starting with the negative exponent law. So, we put into a fraction to make it positive which is  Next, we can do our fractional exponent law, so,  equals . Then we can do to get 36. Our final answer is .

As you can see you can start with either of these laws and still end up with the same answer. I personally start with the fractional exponent law but I understand why others may not.