# What is 2/5 as a decimal?

## Want to practice?

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.