Simplifying Fractions With Negative Exponents

To best understand this lesson, make sure that you have read and understand the following lessons:

1. Simplifying Negative Exponents
2. Simplifying Variables with Negative Exponents

This lesson will explain how to simplify the negative exponents in problems like the following two.

and

The first problem is simply a term with both negative and positive exponents. As you may have noticed in one of the previous lessons, the simplest form of the problem a^-2 is simply

The problem was simplified by just changing its exponent to the opposite sign (from negative to positive) and moving it to the bottom of a fraction.

The next problem we are simplifying has both negative and positive exponents. The variables with positive exponents are left alone while the variables with negative exponents are moved to the bottom of the fraction.