Objectives 

• Greatest Common Factor

• Special Factoring Techniques

• Factoring by Grouping

Examples

• Example 1

• Example 2

• Example 3

• Example 4

Sometimes we can rearrange and group the terms in such a way that we can factor more complicated expressions.

For example,  can be grouped as follows: 

.

Now each grouped term can be treated as a separate factoring problem:

.

We now have an expression in which the GCF of  and 
  is  "  ".

So we can factor again, as follows:  .

Remember:  You can always check your answer to a factoring problem by multiplying back out your answer.

In this example,  we can see that our factored form is correct since
multiplying out yields:

.