Using Radicals with Elementary Operations

Try to group factors in pairs to get perfect squares under the square root:

When combining terms involving radicals, we can only combine the ones that have the same radical. For this problem, that means has to stay on its own while we can combine and into . The simple integers can be combined too, giving us our answer with three seperate terms.

Exponents in the denominator can be subtracted from exponents in the numerator.

Recall that .

Therefore, .