Question

this is about factoring the greatest common factor. how do you solve 15x5-12x4-27x3-3x2squared? this is reallly easy i just forgot how to do it

Answer 1

Are you trying to factor?

Answer 2

Ok I see. You are trying to find a number that goes evenly into each term. If you do not see it right away, you could do a prime factorization, or you could see if the smallest number can go into each of the terms evenly.

15: 3*5
12: 3*2*2
27: 3*3*3
3: 3* 1

All of these numbers have a 3 in them so we can factor that out.
Now look at the x part. The smallest exponent is 2, so we can factor out an x squared. So we are taking out a 3x^2.

Now divide the entire expression by 3x^2 and we get\[3x ^{2}(5x ^{3}-12x ^{2}-9x-1)\]