Car Talk Product Placement Puzzler

January 5, 2015, 12:00 am

Great!

RAY: There are a lot of our little children who listen to Car Talk who are studying Algebra, so I thought I would ask them to simplify the following polynomial.

TOM: Let me just write this down. OK.

RAY: X plus A in parentheses times X minus B in parentheses times X plus C in parentheses, dot, dot, dot, times X minus Z.

Here’s how it looks: (X+A)(X-B)(X+C) … (X-Z)

TOM: So you want —

RAY: I want the product of all those terms.

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