# How to Simplify Factors

By Marija Kero

Simplifying factors is one way to make them easier to work with. Simplify factors with help from an experienced mathematics professional in this free video clip.

### Transcript

Hi, my name is Marija. And today, I'm going to answer the question, how to simplify factors? What you probably mean by that is how do you simplify fractions by using the greatest common factor. So, we'll take a fraction like 14 over 28 and we're going to simplify this by using the greatest common factor. So, what we'll first do is make a list of all the factors of 14 and 28 separately. So, the numbers that go into 14 evenly are one, two, seven and 14. Then I do the same thing for 28. So, for 28, we have one, two, four, seven, 14 and 28. Now, I look at this list of factors and I ask myself, what is the greatest that they have in common. So, they both have a two, they both have a seven, but the greatest number that they have in common is the 14. So, I take that greatest common factor and divide the numerator and the denominator by 14. And when I do that, I get 14 divided by 14 is one and 28 divided by 14 is two, So, 14 divided by 28 in simplified form is one over two. So again, we list out the factors for each of the numbers in the numerator and denominator. And then, we look for the greatest one they have in common. And we divide the numerator and the denominator by that greatest common factor. And we get our simplified fraction.