my “aha” moment this week is when we learned about a quick and easy way to expand and simplify these binomials! *I’ll be doing the first question* The first step you must do is take the two x’s and multiply them together making it x^2. Then you take the 2 and the 4 and add them together to make 6, which would then give you 6x because (2x+4x=6x). Then you finally take 2 x 4, which gives you 8. Then finally your final answer will be, x^2+6x+8 !

I found this question very interesting because this was the first time I came across scientific notation! Scientific notation is where there is only one number before the decimal point. So in order to make 27.1 x 10^4 into scientific notation I had to move the decimal one place to the left. When you move a decimal one place to the left you are in fact adding a positive exponent to the 10^4 (If you were moving it to the right then you’d be adding a negative exponent). Which means that 10^4 is now 10^5. So now we have the number 2.71 x 10^5 (scientific notation form). Though we are not done yet, we need to figure out the value of a + n (a x 10^n). Meaning that we need to addition 2.71 (a) and 5 (n), which gives us 7.71!

I really enjoyed learning rational exponents because they seemed very difficult though in reality they are very simple to understand. For this question I took the 3 (denominator) and made that into a cubed root (using flower power). I then put the 125 as the radicand and the 1 (numerator) as an exponent for 125. The next step I did was that I found the cubed root of 125, which is 5 (because 5•5•5=125). Then finally I had 5 to the power of 1 that was left, which is 5. So 125  to the power of 1/3 is 5!

I learned to convert mixed radicals with variables into an entire radical. I was quiet confused until I later found out that it is  pretty much the same thing as what I learned before. What I did is I took 6 to the power of 2 (using the index as an exponent for 6), which became 36. Then I brought it under the root symbol beside the radicand. Usually I would multiply the 36 and the ‘y’ (radicand) together, though because I do not know the amount of ‘Y’ I left it beside it. In the end I ended up with square root 36y.

i had an ‘ah ha’ moment when we were working with mixed radicals. I did not realize that there is an imaginary index of 2 and the top right hand of the coefficient. I was stumped on multiple questions that had a coefficient infront of the radicand. Though I then figured out once breaking down the equation into sets that I still had to square root it!