From the course: Preparing for the GMAT

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Quadratic equations

Quadratic equations

From the course: Preparing for the GMAT

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Quadratic equations

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- [Instructor] So we call an equation quadratic when one of its terms is squared. To solve this type of equation, we need to do something called factoring a lot of the time, which we will go through in this video. So what if we had this quadratic equation, X squared, minus X, minus six, equals zero. This is kind of a typical quadratic equation, and typically for quadratic equations, there are more than one answer, so we need to kind of think about how to solve for this, and one of the ways we can do so is factoring. So factoring means we have to think about what two terms multiplied by each other would equal zero in this case? So factoring means, what two terms multiplied by each other would produce this same equation up top? So we can typically start the process here by using the first term, because it's pretty easy to figure out what two terms multiplied will give us an X squared. That's always going to be X times X. Now we have to think about the possibilities. We need two numbers…

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