LESSON: Prime Factorization

READ: Find Factor Pairs of Given Numbers

Find Factor Pairs of Given Numbers

This lesson is all about factors. That is where we are going to start. In order to complete any of the work in this lesson, you will first need to understand and identify a factor.

What is a factor?

When you multiply, the numbers that are being multiplied together are the factors of the product. Said another way, a factor is the two or more numbers that are multiplied together for a product.

In this lesson, you will be finding factor pairs this is when only two numbers are multiplied together for a product.

Let’s find some factors.

Example

What are two factors for twelve?

Here we want to find two factors of twelve or two numbers that multiply together to give us twelve. We could list many possible factors for twelve. Let’s choose 3 and 4.

Our answer is 3 $\times$ 4.

What if we wanted to list out all of the factors for twelve? To do this systematically, we should first start with the number 1. Yes, one is a factor of twelve. In fact, one is a factor of every number because any number can be multiplied by one to get itself as a product.

1 $\times$ 12

After starting with 1, we can move on to 2 then 3 and so on until we have listed out all of the factors for 12.

$&1 \times 12\\ &2 \times 6\\ &3 \times 4$

5, 7, 8 etc are not factors of 12 because we can’t multiply them by another number to get 12.

These are all of the factors for 12.