Negative Exponents

In this section, we continue to learn about the rules of exponents. Specifically, we will explain how to work with Negative Exponents and use the Quotient Rule for Exponents. As previously stated, an understanding of these rules will enable us to perform operations with polynomials. Now we will talk about integer exponents and the quotient rule. We begin by demonstrating where our rules for negative exponents and the power of zero come from. Once we understand the pattern, we can see that anything other than zero raised to the power of zero is always one. Next, we see our pattern for negative exponents. For this situation, we take the reciprocal of the base and change the sign of our exponent to positive. Lastly, we talk about the quotient rule for exponents. When we are dividing expressions with exponents and the base is the same, we keep our base the same and subtract exponents.