Question:
We need help on Algebra II with Trig 1.4 #25. How do we get started?
Answer:
We want to reduce the problem.
The first step I take on these kind of problems is to make it easier to see. Looking at what we are given – we can see that the we have two big parts added together in the numerator
One part is the
-2x(x+4)^3
and the other part is the
-3(3-x^2)(x+4)^2
We can see that both parts have an x+4.
Often in busy problems like this, we can make things easier and replace the x+4 with k to get something like
-2xk^3 – 3(3-x^2)k^k
as the numerator. So now we can see we can factor out the k.
k^2 [-2xk – 3(2-x^2)]
We can put this back to get
(x+4)^2 [-2x(x+4) – 3(2-x^2)] / [ (x+4)^6]
Now we can reduce by dividing out the (x+4)^2 term to get
[-2x(x+4) – 3(2-x^2)] / [ (x+4)^2]
