Welcome to this deck on factorising expressions. Factorising is the reverse process of expanding brackets. It's like putting an expression back into its component parts. We'll cover three key types: factorising into a single bracket, factorising the difference of two squares, and factorising simple quadratic expressions.

Let's start with factorising into a single bracket. This method is used when every term in an expression shares a common factor. The first step is to identify the highest common factor of all the terms.

For example, in the expression 6x plus 9, both 6x and 9 can be divided by 3. So, 3 is the highest common factor. We write the 3 outside a new bracket. Then, we work out what goes inside the bracket by dividing each of the original terms by 3.