What's a multiple of 4? What does that mean?

Question

What's a multiple of 4? What does that mean?

1 Answer

Impact of this question

25306 views around the world

You can reuse this answer
Creative Commons License

Answer 1 · 2016-04-17T06:05:01

A multiple of $4$ is any number which can be written in the form $4n$ where $n$ is an integer.

Explanation:

In general, given two values $a$ and $b$ , we say that $b$ is a multiple of $a$ if $b=na$ for some integer $n$ .

For example, $-4, 0, 4, 12,$ and $100$ are all multiples of $4$ because

$-4 = 4xx-1$
$0 = 4 xx 0$
$4 = 4xx1$
$12 = 4xx3$
$100 = 4xx25$

On the other hand, values such as $1$ or $10$ are not multiples of $4$ , as

$1 = 4xx1/4$
$10 = 4xx5/2$

$1/4$ and $5/2$ are not integers.

It is generally correct to state that $b$ is a multiple of $a$ if $b/a$ is an integer, although this requires $a!=0$ .

Intuitively, it makes sense to call these values multiples, as they are the values which can be obtained by adding or subtracting your original value multiple times. A multiple of $4$ is a number which can be written as
$4+4+4+...+4$
or
$4-4-4-...-4$ .
Note that this is equivalent to the above definitions.

Science

Math

Humanities

... and beyond

What's a multiple of 4? What does that mean?

1 Answer

Explanation:

Related questions

Impact of this question