Video in How To Simplify Radicals
Some Necessary Background Knowledg
I. Know your Perfect Squares!
Before you learn how to simplify radicals,you need to be familiar with what a perfect square is. Also, you should be able to create a list of the first several perfect squares. This is easy to do by just multiplying numbers by themselves as shown in the table below.
|List Perfect Squares|
II. You can rewrite a radical as the product of two radical factors of its radicand !
That's a very fancy way of saying that you can rewrite radicals as shown in the table below
|Original Radical||Radical rewritten as product of factors|
How to Simplify Radicals Steps
Let's look at to help us understand the steps involving in simplifying radicals.Step 1
4 is the largest perfect square that is a factor of 8
Rewrite the radical as a product of the square root of 4 (found in last step) and its matching factor(2)