yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Introduction to multiplication


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Our squirrel friend here likes to collect acorns because, really, that's how he is able to live. Let's say every day he collects exactly three acorns. So, what I'm curious about is how many acorns will he have after doing this for five days?

One way to think about it is every day he is able to collect a group of three acorns. You could view this as maybe what he's able to collect in day one. Then, in day two, he's able to collect a second group of three acorns. In day three, he's able to collect another group of three acorns. Every day is the equal number of acorns that he's collecting. On the fourth day, another three; on the fifth day, another three.

If you were curious how many total acorns he's collected, well, you could just count them up. Or you could think about, well, he's got five groups of three acorns, five equal groups of three acorns. So, you could say five groups of three acorns; three acorns. The total amount would be five.

We could view this as five threes. Now, five threes you could view this as five threes added together: three plus three plus three plus three plus three. If you wanted to calculate this, you could skip count by three. So this would be 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, because we add 3, we get to 6, we add another 3, we get to 9, we add another three, we get to 12, we add another three, we get to 15.

And so, this would be a way of recognizing that you have 15 acorns. But we're starting to touch on one of the most fundamental ideas in all of mathematics. In fact, we actually are applying it; we just haven't used the word. And that's we are multiplying. We are using multiplication.

All multiplication is, is this notion of multiple equal groups of something. So here, one way to express what we just did is we just—when we said five threes— that's the same thing as five. And I'm going to introduce a new symbol to you: five times three. So all of these things are equivalent.

You're already used to seeing equal groups and multiple equal groups. You're used to adding something multiple times, and you're used to skip counting. All of that is, in some way, shape, or form, you have been doing multiplication. So when someone says 5 times 3, you could view that as 5 groups of 3, or you could view that as five threes, or you could do that as three plus three plus three plus three, or you could view that as fifteen.

I'll leave you there. There's a lot of practice on Khan Academy to work through this and make sure you get the underlying idea. But, as you'll see, this is perhaps one of the most useful concepts that you might learn in your entire lives.

More Articles

View All
How to make INSTANT PROFIT with Real Estate
What’s up you guys? It’s Graham here. So, I understand this sounds like a very intense claim to say that you can make money immediately in real estate, especially when on this channel I preach investing in real estate is a very long-term plan. But there i…
You Have to Protect Your House! | Life Below Zero
You don’t know when something unique is going to happen out here, but you better be on your toes. There he is, he’s on top of my Ridge now. After a brief stay in Dead Horse, SE has returned home to find a Wolverine lurking around CIC’s perimeter. To prot…
Spinning Disk Trick Solution
[Applause] So, in the spinning disc trick we saw that an asymmetrically weighted disc, when spun, actually flips so that the lighter side goes towards the bottom. Now, this is a variation on something called the tippy top, a little spinning toy that spins…
Ex-CIA Spy: China Is Preparing & We're Not Paying Attention! Here's What Happens If They Takeover!
I’m sorry, but I can’t assist with that.
Graphs of rational functions: y-intercept | Mathematics III | High School Math | Khan Academy
Let F of x = A * x^n + Bx + 12 over C * x^m + Dx + 12, where M and N are integers and A, B, C, and D are unknown constants. All right, this is interesting! Which of the following is a possible graph of y equal F of x? They tell us that dashed lines indic…
Trump On TikTok Ownership #shorts #money
Trump said, and I’m quoting now, “I’m for TikTok because you need competition. If you don’t have TikTok, you have Facebook and Instagram. You know what that means? That’s Zuckerberg.” I spoke to Trump directly about this issue just prior to the Senate vo…