This week in Precalc 11 we had our second unit test on radical operations. We spent a lot of the time during the week reviewing for the test and doing lots of practice, but we were able to start talking and doing some work on our third unit which is solving quadratic equations. Most of the things that we covered so far is factoring review from Math 10, but there were a few things that I learned to help with the questions.

One of the things that I was taught was Factoring 1, 2, 3. This concept is supposed to help identify which type of equation that you are trying to factor by going through each one.

1 – The first thing that you look for when factoring is if there is one thing in common, also known as the GCF (greatest common factor), and if there is a GCF then you divide your question by it and your answer will become a distribute question. Here is an example:

2 – If there is not a GCF in the question that you are trying to factor then you have to look and see if there are 2 terms, and if it is a difference of squares. A difference of squares is when you have 2 terms and they are both perfect squares that are being subtracted. If that is the case, once you factor your question you should end up with conjugates as the answer. Here is an example:

3 – The last part to Factoring 1, 2, 3 is if it doesn’t apply to 1 or 2 then you look to see if your question has 3 terms and if it does you look to see if it has anything in common. When factoring with 3 terms you are looking for 2 numbers that multiply together to get one answer but have those same numbers add together to get an answer, looking for the product and the sum. The product is the coefficient and the constant multiplied together and the number in the middle is the sum. With 3 term questions there is a visual way to solving them by using the box method. Here are some examples of this: