6 people are evenly sharing 5 muffins. How many muffins should each person get

Question



Answer 1

6 people are evenly sharing 5 muffins. How many muffins should each person get

If we are sharing muffins among a group, we must be dividing them. So the operation we are dealing with is division. We are splitting 5 muffins 6 ways. This would mean we are dividing the 5 muffins by 6 people. 5 ÷ 6.

This becomes a decimal division problem since the dividend is smaller than the divisor. 5.0 ÷ 6

It is difficult to show the steps here without being able to draw or create long division problems here but 6 cannot go into 5, so we take it into "50" which is actually 5.0. On the line above 5.0, the decimal is moved straight up and we know that 6 goes into 50 a total of 8 times, so the 8 goes behind the decimal to be 0.8

48 is placed under 50 and subtracted out to leave a remainder of 2. We add a 0 and drop it down behind the 2 to make 20 and take 6 into 20. It goes 3 times. so 3 goes behind the 0.8 on the line above and 18 goes below the 20. Subtract it and we get 2. We can see we get a repeating decimal so the rest depends on the rules of your teacher. On a problem like this, I would tell my students to round the answer to the nearest 10th, making the answer (0.822222222222infinity) become 0.8 muffin. Some teachers want repeating decimals rounded to the nearest thousandth.

This problem can be a bit confusing in typed form. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help!

Answer 2

Well, none of them get "a muffin," since there are more people than muffins.

Each one get 5 / 6 of a muffin. (How do you cut a muffin into 6 pieces?)

Why don't they all chip in an buy another muffin?