How To: Apply the distributive property

The distributive property is a very important factor to consider in math and may save you a lot of trouble on your math homework. For values which lie right outside parentheses, you will need to distribute this value across the contents of whatever is inside the parentheses. You will need to multiply the value outside of the parentheses by first the first term inside the parentheses and then by the following terms inside the parentheses, distributing the value across all the terms found inside the parentheses. Doing this will give you a new value with the same amount of terms as your original one and will enable you to get rid of your parentheses in a math problem.