Elsie, who loves to garden, has the garden plot above. The width of her current garden is 12 the length. Elsie wants to increase
both the width and length of her garden to twice the size. What is the area of the original garden? What is the area of the new garden? How do the areas compare?
There are mnemonic acronyms out there for reminding you how to do this. I think of it simply as using the distributive property. (4x-3)(x+5) = 4x(x+5) -3(x+5) then again = (4x² +20x) + (-3x -15) = 4x² + (20-3)x -15 . . . . . . . combine like terms = 4x² +17x -15
