Dividing by a monomial. Chapter III review

In Chapter III we studied powers with a natural exponent and their properties, the notions of monomial and polynomial, and the operations of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing by a monomial. In a complex expression we follow the order of operations: powers first, then multiplication and division, then addition and subtraction. We pay attention to signs when removing brackets and to every term when multiplying. The final answer should always be in standard form. Sometimes during simplification the letter terms vanish completely and the result is a number. An example of a false equality is (a + b)² = a² + b²; if we are unsure, we test a = 1, b = 2: we get 9 and 5.