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A school principal is planning a trip to the zoo for the seventh and eighth graders. There will be 90 seventh graders and 75 eighth graders going on the trip. The principal wants to divide all the students into groups of equal size and will use prime factorization to find the greatest common factor of 75 and 90 to determine the size of the groups.

• Express 75 as a product of prime numbers.

• Express 90 as a product of prime numbers.

• Show or explain how to find the greatest common factor of 75 and 90 using prime factors.

• If the greatest common factor of 75 and 90 will equal the number of students who will be in each group, determine the number of groups that will be formed.

Show your work or write an explanation to support your answer.

1 Answer

3 votes

Answer:

Explanation:

Sure, I can help you with that! Let's go step by step:

**Express 75 as a product of prime numbers:**

To express 75 as a product of prime numbers, you can perform prime factorization:

75 = 3 * 25

Since 25 can be further broken down into 5 * 5:

75 = 3 * 5 * 5

So, the prime factorization of 75 is 3 * 5 * 5.

**Express 90 as a product of prime numbers:**

Similarly, let's express 90 as a product of prime numbers:

90 = 2 * 45

Further breaking down 45 into 3 * 15:

90 = 2 * 3 * 15

Breaking down 15 into 3 * 5:

90 = 2 * 3 * 3 * 5

So, the prime factorization of 90 is 2 * 3 * 3 * 5.

**Find the greatest common factor (GCF) of 75 and 90 using prime factors:**

To find the GCF of 75 and 90, you need to identify the common prime factors and multiply them together:

Common prime factors: 3 and 5

GCF = 3 * 5 = 15

**Determine the number of groups:**

The GCF of 75 and 90 is 15, and since the principal wants to divide the students into groups of equal size, the number of students in each group will be equal to the GCF, which is 15.

For the seventh graders (90 students):

Number of groups = Total number of students / Students per group

Number of groups = 90 / 15 = 6 groups

For the eighth graders (75 students):

Number of groups = Total number of students / Students per group

Number of groups = 75 / 15 = 5 groups

So, there will be a total of 6 + 5 = 11 groups formed for the trip to the zoo. Each group will consist of 15 students.

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