How do you find the prime factorization of 20?

1 Answer
Apr 8, 2016

20=2×2×5

Explanation:

You can separate out each prime factor in turn as follows:

20 is divisible by 2 (i.e. even) since its last digit is even.

So divide by 2 to get 10.

10 is divisible by 2 since its last digit is even.

So divide by 2 to get 5.

5 is prime.

So we can stop and write down 20 as the product of the primes we have found:

20=2×2×5

This can be written as a factor tree:

0000020
0000/00\
000200010
000000/00\
00000200005