Visually dividing whole numbers by unit fractions

2m read

·Nov 11, 2024

[Narrator] If five is divided into pieces that are each one half of a whole, how many pieces are there? And this would be the equivalent of saying, "What is five divided by 1/2?" And they help us out with this visual. So pause this video and see if you can figure out what that is. How many pieces would you get if you divide five into pieces that are each one half of a whole?

All right, now let's work through this together. So here on this number line we go from zero to five, and then notice they've divided into pieces that are each a half of a whole. This is one piece right over here. So how many of those halves, so this right over here is one half, how many of those halves does it take to make five? Well, two halves make a whole, and we have five wholes. So it's going to be five times two, or 10. And we see that right over here. One half, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 halves make five wholes. So this is going to be equal to 10.

So five divided into pieces of one half, or five wholes divided into pieces of one half would be equal to 10 pieces. Let's do another example. So we have a similar question here. Here we're asked, "If three wholes are divided into pieces that are each 1/6 of a whole, how many pieces are there?" Once again, pause this video and think about it.

Well, they really help us out with this visual because we have three wholes. This is one whole, two whole, and then three wholes, and then we have divided them into pieces that are each 1/6 of a whole. This is a sixth right over here, this is a sixth right over here, so each of these are sixths. And so, if we look at this, we have six sixths in a whole, and so in three wholes we're gonna have six, 12, 18 pieces. And you could literally just count these up. But it makes sense. If you take three wholes and you divide it into sixths, so this is a sixth right over here, each of these wholes are going to be six sixths, so three wholes are going to be three times six sixths, or 18 sixths. There you go.

Tenant Trashed My Property | What It Looks Like Now

Classifying figures with coordinates | Analytic geometry | High school geometry | Khan Academy

View All

Should You Quit Your Job At A Unicorn?

As far as you can tell, the metrics are excellent. Yes, the founders are extremely focused. Yes, your colleagues are very smart and you are very impressed continuing to work with them. Yes, you should probably stay a really long time. Yeah, I mean like th…

Slash and Burn | Live Free or Die

It should go back down. There’s so much green around it. Yeah, got the fire working for us. Looks pretty good up here. God, we just burnt like 400 square feet or some. Wow, this is the art of slashing burn. Whenever we move into a new area to terrace it …

Paying yourself first | Budgeting and saving | Financial Literacy | Khan Academy

You might have heard the term “paying yourself first,” and this just means putting your safety, your needs, especially your future needs, first before you think about other things. So let’s give ourselves an example. Let’s say that you want to buy a lapt…

Directional derivatives and slope

Hello everyone! So what I want to talk about here is how to interpret the directional derivative in terms of graphs. I have here the graph of a function, a multivariable function: it’s ( F(x, y) = x^2 \cdot y ). In the last couple of videos, I talked abo…

Expansion of presidential power | US government and civics | Khan Academy

What we’re going to talk about in this video is the expansion of presidential power. We’ve already seen that the Constitution talks about the different powers that a president would have, but as we’ve gone forward in history, the Constitution hasn’t imagi…

The Soul of Music: Sampa The Great Returns to her Roots | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic

Foreign [Music] Douglas: I’m a producer here at Overheard, and this is the second episode of our four-part series focusing on music exploration and black history. It’s called The Soul of Music. National Geographic explorers will be sitting down with some…

Visually dividing whole numbers by unit fractions

More Articles