How to Solve a Square of a Binomial

How to solve the square of a binomial. I'm Bon Crowder with MathFour,com and we're squaring a binomial. So what does it mean to square something? It means there's two copies of it multiplied with each other. So squaring a binomial means that we have two identical copies and they're being multiplied. So how do you do this. Now you can either do it the long way which is using the distributive property. Some people like to use foil but that can get a little hairy. So we do this and we have three x times three x is nine x squared. Three x times one is three x, one times three x is three x and then one times one is one. So then we have total by combining these like terms nine x squared plus six x plus one. Now if you notice something really interesting, if we square this one we get a one here, if we square this three x we get a nine x squared here and if we multiply these two together and double it which is what happened here then we get six x. So that's kind of the short way rather than the long way to square a binomial. I'm Bon Crowder with MathFour.com. Enjoy.