Can anyone explain to me how to do factoring?

Answer 1

My teachers had us draw a tree to learn this. Like at the top of the tree would be say:
...........20
........./.....\
......10......2
...../....\
....5.....2
So the answer would be 5x2x2
(when we drew the "tree" it's without the periods, I had to put those in to give the tree the right shape)

Answer 2

To factor a number you want to find the numbers that multiply to give you the answer. For example we can factor 15 as 3x5 or 15x1 and we can factor 12 as 2x6 or 3x4 or 12x1. Some numbers can be factored many different ways, but others can't be factored very many ways at all. All numbers can be factored as themselves times 1, but that's not very interesting.

Natural numbers (other than1) that can only be factored as themselves times 1 are called primes. (such as 7 & 11) They are prime numbers.

The opposite of a prime number is composite number. Numbers that can be factored in more than that one way are called composites.

1 is neither prime nor composite, it isn't in the game, probably partly because in earlier times it wasn't regarded as a number.

Try this website (http://faculty.ed.umuc.edu/~swalsh/Math%20Articles/PrimeFactor.html)

Answer 3

it is not too hard it might be hard to show on here though.

Lets say you have 20...2 times 10...2 times 5 times 2
the factors would be factors of 2,2, and 5
don't know if that helps

Answer 4

Wikipedia is often a good place to start. Their article on factoring is at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoring

Dan