When do you use gcf

He wants both kinds of food on each plate. What is the largest number of plates he can use. Conclusion While it is important for students to gain procedural fluency in finding greatest common factors and least common multiples , it is important for us educators to recognize that teaching the various procedures for finding GCF and LCM is not a standalone topic, but rather a foundation skill required for more advanced applications a few years down the road.

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First Name. Email Address. The HCF of these two numbers is 5, so for each person you need:. So, if we want to give cakes to all our friends, and need 25 cupcakes what a popular mathematician! How can GCF be used in real life? Sarah C. Apr 1, We can use it for simplifying fractions or ratios! Explanation: We use greatest common factors all the time with fractions, and as fractions are used a lot in everyday life, this makes GCF very useful! A final example is with recipes.

Then the common factors are those that are found in both lists:. In our previous example, the largest of the common factors is 15, so the Greatest Common Factor of 15, 30 and is Earlier we found that the Common Factors of 12 and 30 are 1, 2, 3 and 6, and so the Greatest Common Factor is 6. And so 12 30 can be simplified to 2 5. Or we can find the prime factors and combine the common ones together:. OK, there is also a really easy method: we can use the Greatest Common Factor Calculator to find it automatically.