Question

three students need to put Deus a prime factorization of 48 Donna States the face factors in the tree should be six and Larry States the first factor in the tree should be fully in 12 Trish stage and the initial factors 48 do not affect prime factorization explain why Trish is correct

Answer 1

Recall that to find the prime factorization of a number is to find prime numbers whose multiplication give us the initial number. For example, if we want to find the prime factorization of 10, we can see that 10=2*5 and 2 and 5 are prime numbers. Note that it is the same 2*5 or 5*2.

In this example, we have 48. We can right 48 = 8*6 or 48 =12*4. However, the prime factorization is unique. So, it doesn't matter if we start with 6 or with 12, since we will end up in the same factorization