This week in Pre Cal 11, we learned about expressing radicals in different forms by converting an entire radical to a mixed radical and vice versa. Also, we also learned about comparing and ordering radicals, as well as determining when a radical is defined. Lastly, we learned about simplifying radicals with variable radicands. In this post, I will mainly focus on how to simplify radicals with variable radicands since it’s the most complicated part that we’ve learned last class among the other three parts that I’ve mentioned earlier and since they’re actually applicable to simplifying radicals with variable radicands.

For this expression, I will be showing and explaining to you how to simplify this one example of a radical. As you see, there’s a variable (x) inside the root sign – which in this case, it is a radicand; the exponent inside is included as well ().

Here’s all the steps on how to simplify this radical: