Decimal multiplication place value

This is an exercise from Khan Academy. It tells us that the product 75 times 61 is equal to 4575. Use the previous fact to evaluate as a decimal this right over here: 7.5 times 0.061. Pause this video and see if you can have a go at it.

All right, now let's do this together. So the first thing that you might realize is that 7.5 is the same thing as 75 divided by 10. And 0.061, this is 61 thousandths. This right over here is the same thing as 61 divided by 1000.

We're going to take the product of these two things. Another way we could write this: 75 divided by 10. This is the same thing as 75 over 10, and I'm going to take the product of that and 61 thousandths, 61 divided by a thousand. So that would be 61 over a thousand.

Now, when we look at it either of these ways—well, actually, I'll do both of them at the same time—you could change the order of the multiplication and the division here. So you could start with 75 times 61, 75 times 61, and then divide that by 10, and then divide that by a thousand. You could do it that way, or you can look right over here and say, all right, if I'm taking this product, my numerator is going to be 75 times 61, 75 times 61, and then my denominator is going to be 10 times a thousand, which is essentially the same thing as dividing by 10 and then dividing by a thousand.

And, of course, that is going to be ten thousand. Now, on the left-hand side right over here, they told us what this is: it's four thousand five hundred and seventy-five. So it's four thousand five hundred and seventy-five divided by 10 and then divided by a thousand. Well, if I divide by 10 and then I divide by a thousand, that's equivalent to dividing by 10,000.

This is dividing by 10,000, and you can see that over here we're dividing by ten thousand as well, right over here. And the seventy-five times sixty-one, this is four thousand five hundred and seventy-five. Now they want us to evaluate it as a decimal.

We've now expressed it as a fraction, and I still haven't fully evaluated this yet. So we really want to think about this as four thousand five hundred seventy-five ten thousandths, and you can see that very explicitly here: this four thousand five hundred seventy-five ten thousandths. So, how do we write that? Well, if I have a decimal right over here, that's the tenths place. This is the hundredths, thousandths, ten-thousandths place.

So we have this many ten thousands: four thousand five hundred seventy-five ten thousandths, and we're done. So this is going to be zero point four five seven five. Now I know what some of you might be thinking.

Hey, I learned a technique where if I'm taking the product of two numbers, I could take the product of those two numbers. If I'm thinking the product of two numbers that are decimals, I could remove the decimals from them, essentially take their product, which they actually gave us right over here, and then count how many digits to the right of the decimal there were in our original number.

So we have one, two, three, four digits to the right of the decimal, and so what I do is I then move, I then make sure that there's four digits to the right of the decimal in the product. And so I would say, okay, one, two, three, four, that looks good. And I've got the same answer a lot faster than we just did it.

Well, the whole reason why I just did it the way I did is to show you why that works. When we take the product of the two numbers without the decimals, we're essentially ignoring the fact that the original product was dividing by 10 and dividing by a thousand. And that's because we had one digit behind to the right of the decimal here, and we had three digits to the right of the decimal there.

And so we later, after we take the product, we have to go and then actually take that product and divide by 10 and divide by a thousand, or divide by 10,000. So that's why you can then just say, all right, well now we have—we originally had four digits to the right, so we still have to have four digits to the right of the decimal point.