Question
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i. Elijah is solving the quadratic equation by factoring.
His work is shown below. In which step did Elijah make his first error? What
is it?

Step 1:
Step 2:
Step 3:
Step 4:
Step 5: or
or

Ask by Love Bush. in the United States
Jan 24,2025

Upstudy AI Solution

Tutor-Verified Answer

Answer

Elijah made his first error in Step 1 by incorrectly splitting –14x as –4x + 18x instead of –18x + 4x.

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Beyond the Answer

Elijah’s first error occurred in Step 1, where he incorrectly tried to split the middle term into and . When splitting the middle term in factoring, the coefficients need to correctly sum to and multiply to (which is ). The numbers and do not satisfy these conditions, leading to incorrect factors later on.
Following this misstep, the rest of Elijah’s work is based on faulty terms. Instead, he should have split the middle term into a pair of terms like , which correctly factors into . Proper factoring requires correct identification of factors based on both addition and multiplication, making his initial mistake fundamental to the process.

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