How do you factor #x^2+5x-24#?
2 Answers
Explanation:
In order to factor, we need to consider 2 things.
1.) What are the factors of the constant?
2.) Which of those add to equal the coefficient before the x value?
In this particular equation, we have the constant being 24. The first two factors that come to mind are 6 and 4, and 8 and 3. Since it is -24, we need one of these numbers to be negative.
Let's look at our "b" value, or the coefficient behind the x value, 5. Looking at our factors and thinking of addition (since one of them must be negative, it will most likely be subtraction instead of addition) I can see that
This means that we can factor our equation using these numbers, getting us the following:
Hope this helped!
Explanation:
We need to look at factors of
whose sum is
The only pair satisfying this condition is