Expert: Bobby Soltani - 8/5/2004

Question
Bobby can you help me in "performing indicated operations" on this problem?
This is what the fraction problem looks like.

3x-2   2x+1
---- - ----
10     15

Answer
Hi Randy,

The first step you want to do is to get a common denominator for each fraction.  Then we can subtract the numerators and get the answer.

Since the denominators are 10 and 15, we can see that 30 is the lowest common multiple between them.  So, we can muliply the first fraction by 3/3 and the second by 2/2.  Let's do that.

(3/3)*(3x-2)/10 = (9x-6)/30
(2/2)*(2x+1)/15 = (4x+2)/30

Now we can subtract the two numerators and put the result over our new denominator.

(9x-6)/30 - (4x+2)/30 = [(9x-6)-(4x+2)]/30
=[9x-6-4x-2]/30 = (5x-8)/30

That is the answer.  Also, I'm working on the other problem you gave me.  There is not a real easy way to do factoring.

Bobby