Oh, the wonderful world of functions!  What you learn here will affect your understanding of many chapters to come.  You learn what zeroes of a function are.  Any guesses?  You also learn about coefficiants, terms, leading coefficiants, leading terms, and degrees of a polynomial.  You learn an easy way to divide polynomials through a method called synthetic division.  You will also learn the remainder and factor theorems.  This is one of the shortest sections in the book.  It will go by pretty fast, but it is important.