The problem
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Hi, I am just confused as to why we are subtracting 4.
Answer provided by our tutors
We need to reduce the fraction the the lowest term, so we are dividing by x^4 above and bellow the fractional bar.
x^4:x^4 = 1
and
x^9:x^4=x^(9-4)
or as we have it in the solution: