This week in math we finished up our polynomials unit.

Here is an example of something we have learned.

The first thing we have to do is see if we have anything in common with each of our terms. If you look at the question you can see that they can all be divided by four. So first we’re going to do is divide each term and then write it out in the simplified form.

After I divided it we always have to bring down the number we divided it by, which in this case it’s four, and then we just place it in front of our bracket with our simplified terms inside.

We aren’t done here. We need to break apart these terms since we have an X squared in our brackets which needs to be simplified.

Seen above, i had to figure out 2 numbers that would both multiply to get out last number and add up to get our middle number. I spread out X squared out into both brackets since we would multiply them together and then i put a negative 8 because our last number is a negative and because -8 added to 1 is -7.