Video Transcript
Simplify three 𝑥 all raised to the
zeroth power plus negative eight 𝑥 all raised to the zeroth power.
In this question, we are asked to
simplify an expression involving raising two bases involving an unknown value of 𝑥
to an exponent of zero.
To answer this question, we can
begin by recalling the zero exponent rule, which tells us that raising any nonzero
base to the zeroth power gives a value of one. This allows us to directly simplify
each term in the expression separately, provided the base is nonzero.
It is worth noting that zero raised
to the zeroth power is undefined. So we can safely assume that both
bases are nonzero. We can see that for each base to be
equal to zero, we would have 𝑥 equal to zero. So, to apply this result, we need
𝑥 not equal to zero. This gives us one plus one, which
we can calculate is equal to two. If we wanted to be more accurate,
we could also say that this expression only equals two when 𝑥 is nonzero, and it is
undefined otherwise.
