The purpose of the exercise in this lesson is to develop some muscle memory with exponent laws, which helps avoid to errors in future work and develop some efficiencies.
Students studying remotely: Please print the worksheet linked at the end of the page. Choose 5 questions from each column in the exercise. Show your steps for simplifying each expression. Check the answers to see if you have made correct sense of each expression.
Example 1
Simplify
It is important to remember that the exponent applies to only what it is written beside. The exponent applies to the
, not to the
. Written out in full we have:
In short,
Example 2
Simplify
The exponent 3 is applied to each factor in the bracket:
Example 3
Simplify
A negative exponent means to divide repeatedly. We ‘take the reciprocal‘. The result here is a small, positive number.
Example 4
Simplify
It is helpful here to create a new law:
Simplify
In short,
Applying this new law, we have and
.
Example 5
Simplify
It is helpful to gather like terms as follows:
Example 6
Simplify
Let’s make another new law.
Simplify
In short,
Apply this new law to example 6 we have