To answer this question, you have to remember that you can't distribute a power the same way you can distribute multiplication and division. So (x+8)3 is the same as (x+8)(x+8)(x+8). Then you multiply it out, and it looks like x3+8x2+8x2+64x+8x2+64x+512 You do this by multiplying each of the numbers in each binomial by each of the other numbers, so first you do x*x*x, then x*x*8, then x*8*x, and so on. Simplified, this looks like x3+32x2+128x+512 Hope this helped!