Square A′B′C′D′ is a dilation of square ABCD .

What is the scale factor?

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If you want to dilate an object you just need to enlarge or reduce the size of that object. In this way, the scale factor determines how much larger or smaller the object will become. So we know some facts:

One important thing is that the dilated object will be similar to its original. The missing figure is attached below. As you can see, when applying dilation the square ABCD is reduced in size to become the square A'B'C'D', thus the scale factor can be calculated as:

As you can see the factor is less than 1, so the object will decrease in size as we predicted.