Question

the area of a rectangle is x^2 + 4x + 3. The length of the rectnagle is x + 1. a. find the width of this rectangle. b. draw a picture of this. Please explain how the answer is x +3 thanks!

Answer 1

Looking at the picture, notice how the area of the rectangle can be split up into sections. When you find the area of the smaller sections by simple multiplication and add all the areas together, you get the area of the entire thing, x² + 4x + 3. When you reduce an expression like that to a product, you "factored" it into its factored form. I dunno if you know how to factor yet and I hated learning about it this way when I took algebra, but eventually you'll learn there are much easier ways to solve this problem.