Factoring: Special Cases Part II - Problem 1

When you are doing your factoring by grouping homework your first few problems are going to look like this, where they are going to give you the sum or difference of two different products. So the way factoring by grouping works is you are looking for the greatest common factor binomial, like look here x minus 2 is part of this product.

And x minus 2 is also part of that product. That tells me that the whole quantity x minus 2 is my greatest common factor. What it’s being multiplied by is everything else 9x plus 4. Here we go that's it, that's my final answer. That's the factored form of this sum so if you are given a problem early in your homework that looks like this, look for the binomial they have in common that's going to be one of your factors and then the stuff it’s been multiplied by would be your other factor.

This is some of the introductory work you are going to do in factoring by grouping and this is going to be like the problem half way done. When you start moving into your homework further along they are going to give you this stuff multiplied out it's not already going to be written as the sum of two different products.