Question

Factor the polynomial below. To earn full credit please share all work/calculations/thinking. You may want to do this work by hand and then upload an image of that written work rather than try to type it all out. 2p^2-5p-7

Answer 1

To factor this expression the first step is to rewrite the second term as if it were a difference, this way:

$2p^2-5p-7=2p^2+2p-7p-7$

Now, we need to group the terms:

$(2p^2+2p)+(-7p-7)$

Factor each group of terms using common factor:

$2p(p+1)-7(p+1)$

At this point, we can determine that (p+1) is a common factor of the expression, so we can rewrite it this way:

$(2p-7)(p+1)$

And that is the factored expression.