Question

Factor:

2x^4-4x^3y^2+8x^2y

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

For factoring, the first step is to look for common factor for all the terms. In this case, we find that all the terms contain 2 and x² as a common factor.
Extract 2x² from every term to get
-2x²(2xy²-4y-x²)
from which the expression inside the parentheses cannot be factorized further (using whole number coefficients).
Thus the answer would be as shown above.