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Multiplying. and Dividing. Radicals. A property of mathematics says that square roots can be distributed over multiplication. That means a radical such as. can be written as. Or a radical expression such as. can be written as. which simplifies to. Try these:.
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Multiplying and Dividing Radicals
A property of mathematics says that square roots can be distributed over multiplication. That means a radical such as can be written as
Or a radical expression such as can be written as which simplifies to
A related property says that square roots are also distributive over division:
Because 75 is not a perfect square . . . What makes this one different? . . . we don’t know what its square root is. We need to do something else to simplify it.
One possibility is to get an approximation from a calculator
But another way to simplify it is to use what we just learned about multiplying square roots.
What just happened? What allowed us to change to ?
One of our numbers was the square root of a perfect square.
Since we know the square root of perfect squares, we can write as
A radical term with all perfect square factors extracted from the radical is said to be in Simplest Radical Form.
Look at this example: Is it in simplest radical form? Have all perfect square factors been removed?
Did you say 4? We need to remove a factor of 4, so we will have: You’re right!
Just like when we simplify fractions, when we simplify radicals, we are not through until all possible factors have been removed.
And just like when we simplify fractions, it saves a step or two if we remove the greatest possible factor first.