Why am I getting two numbers when taking the square root?
Answer
A common situation that confuses many people in math is the process of taking the square root of a number (arithmetic) or variable (algebra).
For example, if we have the number 16 and we take the square root, we will get the answer: 4. But when solving an equation such as x2 =16, by taking the square root of both sides of the equation, x = -4 and 4. The reason why this happens is because a negative number times a negative number is a positive number. Because "squaring" means we are multiplying that number by itself one time, thus there are two possible values for x that square to be 16..
This information is important and explains why we get one number when doing the arithmetic of taking the square root of 16, but two numbers when solving equations by taking the square root.