Question

What is canceling equal factors?
please not in examples but in words

Answer 1

Two variables will cancel when one is being divided by the other and they are the same. I know you asked for no examples, but it's all that can be done on this site to explain. In the following, you have \[\frac{ab}{ac}\]we can 'cancel' the a's because what the above is saying is,\[\frac{ab}{ac}=\frac{a}{a} \times \frac{b}{c}=1 \times \frac{b}{c}=\frac{b}{c}\]The a's 'disappear'...only because you're dividing one number by itself, which always yields 1.

Hope this helps.