How do you factor x2 4

If you clear the denominators in Cymath's answer, you get Wolfram's answer. Solution 2: Complete the square. The Substitute The Substitute 3, 3 3 gold badges 25 25 silver badges 50 50 bronze badges.

Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Post as a guest Name. Email Required, but never shown. Upcoming Events. Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile. It looks like -6 and -4 will do the trick and so the factored form of this polynomial is,.

This time we need two numbers that multiply to get 9 and add to get 6. In this case 3 and 3 will be the correct pair of numbers. Note as well that we further simplified the factoring to acknowledge that it is a perfect square.

You should always do this when it happens. Okay, this time we need two numbers that multiply to get 1 and add to get 5. However, we can still make a guess as to the initial form of the factoring. However, finding the numbers for the two blanks will not be as easy as the previous examples. We will need to start off with all the factors of At this point the only option is to pick a pair plug them in and see what happens when we multiply the terms out.

This time it does. They are often the ones that we want. With some trial and error we can get that the factoring of this polynomial is,. This means that the initial form must be one of the following possibilities. Note as well that in the trial and error phase we need to make sure and plug each pair into both possible forms and in both possible orderings to correctly determine if it is the correct pair of factors or not.

However, in this case we can factor a 2 out of the first term to get,. This is exactly what we got the first time and so we really do have the same factored form of this polynomial. There are some nice special forms of some polynomials that can make factoring easier for us on occasion. Here are the special forms.

Notice as well that the constant is a perfect square and its square root is The correct factoring of this polynomial is,. To be honest, it might have been easier to just use the general process for factoring quadratic polynomials in this case rather than checking that it was one of the special forms, but we did need to see one of them worked.

So, this must be the third special form above. Here is the correct factoring for this polynomial. Here is the factoring for this polynomial. There are rare cases where this can be done, but none of those special cases will be seen here.

There is no one method for doing these in general. What is left is a quadratic that we can use the techniques from above to factor. Doing this gives us,. This can only help the process. There is no greatest common factor here. However, notice that this is the difference of two perfect squares. Neither of these can be further factored and so we are done.

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