Radicals often are not very imformative as far as their true value. For example, if you wanted to order fractions, decimals, and radicals, you would have a hard time. Simplifying radicals helps to make it easier to figure out its true value without having to round. For example, ordering 1/3, 0.25, and √500. You factor out any numbers you know have perfect squares. So you could make it √(100)*√(5) b/c 5*100=500. Then you could simplify √(100) to 10, and you would get 10√5. B/c you know that √5 is about 2.2ish, 10*2.4≈ 22. So you could order them as .25, 1/3, √500 (smallest to largest). Perfect squares are numbers like 4,9,16,25,36,etc which simplify easily(ex. √4=2, √9=3,√16=4). So yto simplify those fractions you can simply plug them into a calculator. If you do not know perfect squares, plug them into a calculator, and if it is not a full number you must use the first method described above.