FOIL

In this section, we learn how to find the product of two binomials using the process known as FOIL. In the last section, we talked about multiplying any two polynomials together. In order to perform this operation, we must multiply each term of the first polynomial by each term of the second polynomial. One problem that arises very often is to find the product of two binomials. When this occurs, we can turn to FOIL. The process of FOIL is nothing more than a way to conveniently multiply two binomials together. It does not work for any other multiplication problem with polynomials. FOIL stands for first terms, outer terms, inner terms, and last terms. Once we have performed all of these operations, we then combine like terms to report our answer.