00:01
We're being asked to factor the given polynomial.
00:03
Well, anytime you're asked to factor, you should always look for our greatest common factor first.
00:07
Well, in this case, we have a greatest common factor of two, but because my first term is negative, i'm actually going to factor out a negative two, because we're always going to want that first term to be positive.
00:18
We're going to now divide each term by negative two, which will leave us with x squared plus 2x minus 8.
00:26
So now we have this trinomial whose a term is equal to 1.
00:29
So what we're going to look for is what will multiply to our last term, negative 8, but we'll add to our middle coefficient of 2.
00:39
So the factors i'm thinking about are 4 and 2.
00:42
Well, how would i get 2? well, 4 would have to be positive and 2 would have to be negative...