Raj poured 4 2/3 liters of water equally into identical cups. Each cup contained 2/9 liter of water. How many cups did Raj use?

Answer 1

Let's look at this question for a moment. You'll notice that one of the fractions is a mixed fraction, while the other is a regular fraction in proper form.

To make this easier, convert 4 2/3 into a fraction of regular form. To do this multiply the denominator by the whole number, then add that answer to the numerator. Write that answer over the original denominator. You should get 14/3.

We can now solve this equation because the fractions are both in the same format.

Read this question again to figure out what operation we should be using for this problem. In this case, Raj is putting the same amounts of water into several cups (he is dividing up the water).

In this question, we are interested in finding out the number of cups he used. We know two values: the amount of water Raj started with and the amount of water that he put into each of the cups. In order to find out the number of cups that Raj used, we take the amount of water that Raj started with (14/3) and divide it by the amount of water that was in each of the cups (2/9).

Anytime you divide by a fraction, you multiply by its reciprocal, as follows.

14/3 * 9/2

We can further simplify these fractions before multiplying so that we can get a more simplified answer. To do this, look at the numerator from the first fraction and the denominator of the second fraction to figure out their greatest common factor; we can divide them by this number. In this case, that would be 14 and 2. The greatest common factor of them is 2, so both numbers can be divided by 2. Do the same for the denominator of the first fraction and the numerator of the second fraction. When you're done, you should have something that looks like this.

7/1 * 3/1

which can be further simplified to 7*3 (because both numbers divided by 1 equal themselves, so

7*3 = 21.

However, if you just choose to multiply the fractions without simplifying them at all, you would have the following

126/6 = 21

Raj used 21 cups to divide up the water.

Either method is acceptable. Hope this helped!