Question

How do you divide radicals on a calculator?

Answer 1

Hint: There are two ways by which you can divide a radical on a calculation. The first method is to use the square root option in case of if you were asked to find the square root of a number. If you were asked to find the cube root, then you can opt for cube root. Both the options are available in the calculator itself.
And the second method is, let us consider a number $\sqrt x $, if we were asked to find the square root of a number, we can type in the calculator as $x^{(1 \div 2)}$.

Complete step by step solution:
To divide a radical on a calculator, there is a possibility of asking two questions. Either they can be in fraction or they may not be in fraction.
For non-fraction number, what we have to do is, let the number be $\sqrt {16} $, by seeing this we can able to find it this is a square root and hence the given number can also be written as,
$\sqrt {16} = {(16)^{\dfrac{1}{2}}}$
And now type $16^(1 \div 2)$ in the calculator to find the answer for this non fractional radical.
For the fractional radical, we have to use quotient rule which is, when the index value is same in both the numerator and denominator the fraction can be written as,
$\dfrac{{\sqrt[2]{a}}}{{\sqrt[2]{b}}} = \sqrt[2]{{\dfrac{a}{b}}}$
Index number is $2$. Index number is nothing but the superscripts present in the left and above the square root. This rule is possible only when the index number is the same in both the numerator and denominator.
Now let us find how to divide it in a calculator. For that consider the fraction which is $\sqrt[{}]{{\dfrac{{64}}{{16}}}}$. Now type in your calculator as $(64 \div 16) ^{(1 \div 2)}$ and click enter you will get your answer.

Note: To find the value of a radical in a fraction form, we have to check two rules. One is as I already mentioned the index number should be the same for both the numerator and denominator. And the other one is that the denominator should not be equal to zero.