In one school, 5/6 of the sixth-graders take a foreign language. Of these students 2/5 take French. What fraction of students take French?

Question

Confused on how the steps to get the answer 1/3, so kind of need to see this to explain to daughter where she went wrong.

Answer 1

In word (story) problems, the word "of" usually means "multiply."

 

5/6 "of" sixth-graders    means    (5/6)*(number of sixth-graders)

2/5 "of" these               means   (2/5)*(5/6)*(number of sixth-graders)

                                               (1/3)*(number of sixth-graders)     [cancel 5; 2 into 6 is 3]

Answer 2

Hi Shanna,

 

       There are many ways to understand this problem. You are told that 5/6th of the students take a FL. So if you think of this as pie chart there will be one big piece (5/6) and one small piece (1/6). What you need to do now is figure out how much 2/5 is of 5/6 that is 2/5x5/6=10/30 or 1/3 take French

 

      Another way to do this is to suppose the total number of six grade students is say 300 then 300x5/6=250 take a FL and of those 250 2/5 or 100 take French. Now to answer the question we must compute the fraction of students who take French that is 100/300=1/3.

 

Hope this helps..let me know if you have any questions.

 

Jim

Answer 3

Hi Shanna!

 

Answering these kinds of problems are tricky because of the wording. The problem states that 5/6 of the students take a foreign language. Then it goes on to state the of the students taking a foreign language 2/5 take French. Whenever you have a word problem which goes into a subset of a population (in this case students who speak French) and then asks a question about the population as a whole (all sixth graders in this case), it is a good rule of thumb to utilize multiplication of the two fractions given. The wording kind of clues us into this approach. From here, the problem becomes simply arithmetic. (5/6)*(2/5) = 10/30 = 1/3.

 

Hope this helped!

 

Navya