Tuesday, February 12, 2008

February 11, 2008

Today in class we learnt how to Simplify Radicals.

Mrs. Remple used a card game at first to help us understand the concept.
She handed everyone a few cards from her deck of cards. Everyone organized their cards into pairs of 2. We put all our pairs on the left side of our desk and our extra cards on the right. Then we repeated all this but making sets of 3. It helped show us what happens when we are simplifying radicals.

Here is an example:

²√ 16x³y¹z²
= 2∙2∙2∙2∙x∙x∙x∙y∙z∙z
There are two sets of 2s.
{2∙2}∙{2∙2}∙x∙x∙x∙y∙z∙z
There is one set of X’s and one X left over.
{2∙2}∙{2∙2}∙{x∙x}∙x∙y∙z∙z
There is only one Y, so it is just a left over.
There is one set of Z’s with 0 left over.
{2∙2}∙{2∙2}∙{x∙x}∙x∙y∙{z∙z}.
The simplified answer is:
2²xz√xy