Jane comes up to you with the following dilemma:
She read in the book that but she
did some math on her own and came up with the following:
Her question is how can this be? Write a paragraph explaining how to resolve this dilemma for her.
The violation of rules for multiplying under
radicals is violated in this step above:
That is incorrect.
When multiplying two square roots, we can
only multiply POSITIVE numbers under square
root radicals, NEVER negative numbers.
If a negative number is under a square root
radical such as , we must first
write it as so that there will
only be a positive number under the square root
radical. And we simply learn that
by definition.
Edwin