What is 2/5 as a decimal?

Any fraction can be converted to its decimal form by dividing the numerator by the denominator.

Solution

These are the steps to convert the given fraction to decimal.

Step 1: Identify the numerator and denominator of the fraction. The number on the top (2) is the numerator and the number at the bottom is the denominator (5).

Step 2: Perform long division by dividing 2 (dividend) by 5 (divisor).

Note that since 2 cannot be divided by 5, you can add zeros to the dividend by placing a decimal point in the quotient.

The decimal form of $$\frac25$$ is 0.4.The long division method is the standard method to convert any fraction to decimal form.

There is an alternative way to convert a fraction to decimal when you can convert the denominator to 10, 100, 1000, and so on.

Let’s see how we can convert $$\frac25$$ using this method.The denominator 5 can be converted to 10 by multiplying 2.Hence we can multiply both the numerator and denominator by 2 to keep our fraction unaltered.

$$\frac{\mathbf2\boldsymbol\times\mathbf2}{\mathbf5\boldsymbol\times\mathbf2}\boldsymbol=\frac{\mathbf4}{\mathbf{10}}$$

As 10 has one zero, we can move the decimal point by one digit to the left.Hence the answer is 0.4.

We invite you to read other articles on decimal and fraction, on our blog.

You may be interested in what is 2/3 as a decimal fraction?

Find More Fractions to Decimals