Interactive · 2 questions
Factoring: Product of a Sum and Difference
Whenever you see a polynomial in the form of , where and are perfect squares, its factored form is .
Examples:
In the case of this final expression, we can use the same rule to factor even further:
Test Yourself!
Factor
Great job!
This pattern will always hold for products of a sum and difference. But, as always, a good way to check your work is to multiply the binomials together to see if you get your original expression.
As we can see, once we FOIL'd the answer, we got the original expression, so we can confirm that our answer is correct!
Try the next example!
Factor
This problem got a little tricky, so let's break down what happened.
First, we noticed that the original expression, was a product of a sum and difference. So, let's use our pattern to factor easily.
We can see that and .
Our factored form has to take the form of . So, our factored expression is: .
Like before, we can check our work by multiplying out the binomials.
