Question

How do you factor 5a - 20 ?

Answer 1

Hint: In order to solve this question, you first have to see if there is any common factor between the two terms 5a and 20. We can see that there is a common factor in this question and that the common factor is 5. Therefore, you have to take the 5 as common and you are left with the a – 4 term. Then you get the final answer for the question.

Complete step by step answer:
The question can be done in the following steps.
The first step in order to solve the question, is that we have to see if there is any term we can take out as common from both the terms. In the above given question, we can see that the term 5 is common for the terms 5a and 20.
 If we take out 5 from 5a we get 5.
If we take out 5 from 20, we get 4.
Therefore, the left out term is
$\Rightarrow a-4$
Now we have to multiply the common term 5 with the above term to get the final answer. Hence we get the answer as
$\Rightarrow 5\left(a-4\right)$

Therefore, we get the final answer for the question, how do you factor 5a – 20, as $5\left(a-4\right)$.

Note: This type of problem can be done by finding out the common terms in the expression. You do not have any formula for these kinds of problems. You can verify the answer by again multiplying all the terms using the distribution law.