Alright, so today I’m gonna walk you through how I tackled finding the least common multiple (LCM) of 20 and 40. It’s actually pretty straightforward once you get the hang of it. I’ll break it down Barney-style.
First things first, I started by listing out the multiples of 20. I mean, literally listing them. 20, 40, 60, 80, 100… you get the idea. Just kept adding 20 to the previous number. It’s grunt work, but somebody’s gotta do it.
Next, I did the same thing for 40. Multiples of 40 are 40, 80, 120, 160, 200, and so on. Again, nothing fancy here, just straight-up multiplication.
Now comes the fun part – spotting the common multiples. Looking at my two lists, I saw that 40 appeared in both. Bam! That’s a common multiple. But is it the least common multiple? Gotta keep going, just in case.
Okay, after 40, I noticed that 80 also showed up in both lists. So, 80 is also a common multiple. Hmm, which one is smaller? Well, 40 is obviously less than 80.
At this point, I figured 40 was probably the LCM, but I wanted to be absolutely sure. I mentally checked if 20 could divide evenly into 40 (it can, 40 / 20 = 2) and if 40 could divide evenly into 40 (obviously, 40 / 40 = 1). Since both divided cleanly, I was 100% confident.
So, the least common multiple of 20 and 40 is 40. Boom! Done. See, wasn’t that hard? Sometimes the simplest way is the best way. No need to overcomplicate things with fancy formulas when you can just list ’em out and see for yourself.
There are definitely other ways to do it, like using prime factorization. You know, breaking down each number into its prime factors and then combining them to find the LCM. But honestly, for smaller numbers like 20 and 40, I find this method faster and easier. Plus, it’s less likely to screw up if you’re tired or just not feeling the math vibes that day.
Anyway, that’s how I did it. Hope this helps someone out there! Until next time, keep those multiples rolling!
