Question

What are the prime factors of 38?

Answer 1

Hint: First understand the term ‘prime factors’. Write the given number 38 as the product of its primes. See the different prime numbers that are appearing in the product to get the total prime factors of 120. If any prime factor is appearing more than once then mention it only one time.

Complete step by step solution:
Here we have been provided with the number 38 and we are asked to find its prime factors. First let us know about the term ‘prime factors’.
In mathematics, the term ‘prime numbers’ denotes the numbers that have only two factors, one factor is 1 and the other is the number itself. Factor means the numbers which divide any other number completely, i.e. the remainder is 0. If any number has more than two factors then it is called composite number.
Now, every composite number can be expressed as the product of its prime factors using the primes. So, we can write 38 as: -
\[\Rightarrow 38=2\times 19\]
We can see that the both 2 and 19 are prime numbers and no factor is repeating. So 38 has only two prime factors, they are 2 and 19.

Hence, 2 and 19 are the prime factors of 38.

Note: Note that 1 and 38 are also the factors of the given number 38 but we cannot include them here because they aren’t prime. 1 is neither a prime nor a composite and 38 is a composite number. Prime factorization is often used in finding the square roots of large numbers and also used in finding the L.C.M and H.C.F of two or more numbers.