Factors of 85

Introduction

There is a place in New Zealand that has the longest name for a place in the world. It is called Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu. This place has 85 letters in the name if you counted all of the letters. If you wanted to memorize this place’s name so that you could spell it easily, how would you go about doing it? One way would be to divide the name into chunks and memorize each chunk of letters. To do that, it would be best that each chunk contains the same number of letters as the other groups. Use the factors of 85 to divide the name into equal chunks?

Finding the Factors of 85

Certain steps are needed to find the factors of a number like 85. You may be able to tell right off the bat that 85 does not have a lot of factors for it. First, it is not an even number. Second, it is not a number that has a single-digit multiplication fact for it. However, let’s see if we can find all of the factors. There might be a surprise set of factors in there that you might not have thought of. This might cause problems because it would be easy to miss factors if they are not obvious.

So, the factors of 85 are only 1, 5, 17, and 85.

With that incredibly long name of the place in New Zealand, you could divide the name into groups of 5 letters each. Then you would have 17 groups. You could also divide the name into 17 letters and memorize 17 letters at a time. You would have 5 groups to memorize.

Challenging Questions