Products and factors

Jonathan Lam April 16, 2013

Expanding brackets

The laws of arithmetic tell us that a(x + y ) = ax + ay , and that (a + b)(c + d) = ac + ad + bc + bd. Perfect squares (a + b)2 = a2 + 2ab + b2 Square of a dierence (a b)2 = a2 2ab + b2 Dierence of two squares (a + b)(a b) = a2 b2 It is very important that these are memorised instead of having to work them out each time. The proof is left as an exercise to the reader.

Identities

Factorising

Factorising is the opposite of expanding. There are four main ways to factorise.

Highest common factors

Look for common factors of all the terms and take out the highest common factor. Repeat until it can no longer be factorised.

Dierence of two squares Grouping

If you see an expression in the form a2 b2 , you know it's a dierence of two squares. When there are four or more terms, you can split the expression into groups and factorise each group separately, then factor out the whole expression by taking out a common factor, or otherwise.

Monic quadratics

A quadratic is an equation in the form ax2 + bx + c = 0. A monic quadratic is when a = 1. To factorise monics, we nd two numbers that add to get b and multiply to get c. Let's call these  and  . Then the factorised monic quadratic is (x + )(x +  ). Note that if both b and c are positive, then  and  will also be positive. If b is negative and c is positive, then  and  will be negative. If c is negative,  will be positive and  will be negative.

Non monic quadratics We nd two numbers,  and  , where  +  = b and  = ac

Algebraic fractions

An algebraic fraction is a fraction with pronumerals. You will often need to factorise expressions to nd common denominators etc. To add and subtract, factor all the denominators, then work with the lowest common denominator. For multiplying and dividing, factor all numerators and denominators completely before cancelling. For compound fractions, multiply by something that would clear the fractions.