Janet Henderson is a secretary. She works Monday to Friday every week. If she worked a total of 44.5 hours this week, and her regular pay is $11.46 per hour, what is Janet’s regular pay? What is Janet’s overtime pay? What is Janet’s gross pay?

Hi there!

We can use long division to find the other roots of p(x).

We know that x + 1 is a factor, so:

Set up:

Find how many times that the first term in the divisor goes into the first of the dividend. Subtract from like terms.

         x² - x - 6

x + 1 | x³ + 0x² - 7x - 6

         x³ + x²

         0 - x²     - 7x

            - x²      - x

             0        - 6x - 6

                        -6x - 6

                          0     0

Therefore, x² - x - 6 is another factor. We can factor this further:

Find two numbers that add up to -1 and multiply into -6. We get:

-3, 2

(x - 3)(x + 2)

The entire polynomial factored is:

(x -3)(x + 2)(x + 1)