Solving Radical Equations & Identifying Extraneous Solutions

Solving Radical Equations & Identifying Extraneous Solutions

In this lesson, we will learn how to solve radical equations, which are equations in algebra that contain radical expressions. The basic technique is to move all radicals to one side of the equal sign, then square both sides of the equation in order to remove the radicals. Then we can solve it as usual. We must be careful however because we might introduce extraneous solutions which we will need to check for in the final answer by substitution into the original equation.

[marlydahl]

We knew that there is only one solution for x but when we squared both sides of the equation it becomes quadratic in form hence we introduced an extra solution.