Look at my post, it is what he/she may have been thinking about when he/she solved the problem.
]]>That statement is not true. Mathsy did not mean that.
]]>It doesn't make sense to me though.
]]>Good answer mathysperson, that is the way. In case you can't follow it, I think this is his reasoning. Normally to find the independent term (constant term) you would just set x=0, but that is not possible here, because of the x in the denominator, Start with the binomial expansion of.
The general term is:
with
So:
Pull out of the brackets all the constants and get them on the left
Set the exponents of
and equal to 0Now just plug into (A).
]]>There is a shortcut to this, because most of the expansion is irrelevant to you.
You're only interested in the term that doesn't contain any x. This is (x^2/2)^5 * (-1/x^2)^5 = -1/32.
The coefficient of this term is 10C5 = 252, which means the independent term of your expansion is -252/32 = -7.875.
]]>Is it a must to expand the whole thing out and look at the independent term, or is there a shortcut??
i still can't figure out how to make the "0" smaller
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