Week 10 Blog Post: Math 10

This week, we studied Difference of Squares.

It’s easy to tell if a question is a Difference of Squares question or not.

You can tell by whether or not it has a subtraction sign, and whether it’s a binomial, meaning there’s two terms.  In the following Difference of Squares equation, we must solve and expand it.

 − 36

We’ll take the and put the individual coefficients in separate brackets like this:

(p  )(p  )

Next, we take 36, and do the square root of it.

= 6

So, we’re left with 6.

Now, we’re going to incorporate the 6 into our new equation.

We need to use zero pairs, so one six is going to be left as a positive, and the other as a negative.

Our final, expanded equation will look like this:

(p – 6)(p + 6)

So when you use the distributive property, or the claw, you’ll get  – 36.