For week 3 of pre-calc 11, we had two short lessons to begin our unit on “Absolute Value and Radicals”. Lesson 1 focused on absolute value, something I had not been familiar with until now. The concept describes the digit value of a number from zero. A formula can be used in which you take the square root of a square to get a numbers absolute value.

Ex:

If we take the number -5 for example, -5 squared is 25, then root 25 is 5. The absolute value of -5 is 5. It is 5 places away from 0.

= 5

Lesson 2 focused on simplifying radical expressions, using the prime factorization and breaking down the expression, methods that we used in math 10. To simplify an entire radical such as we take all the prime factors (2x2x2x2x2x3), and gather the groups of 2 as it is a SQUARE root. There are two groups of 2’s with a leftover 2 and a leftover 3. The groups are multiplied together (2×2 = 4) which makes the coefficient, and the leftovers are multiplied giving the radicand. = 4