Sarah read 1/ 3 of a book in the morning, and she read some more at night. By the end of the day, she still had 1 /4 of the book left to read. How much of the book did Sarah read at night?

Answer 1

Hi Ashley! The easiest thing to do first is convert all of these fractions to common denominators, and figure out the rest of the problem from there. So the common denominator between 1/3 and 1/4 is 12, so convert these to fractions to /12 and continue on.

Think of the whole book being 12/12, and Sarah read 4/12 of it in the morning, so we know she has 8/12 left of it. Since we know she still has 3/12 left to read by the end of the day, we can subtract 8/12 - 3/12 to find out how much she read at night, which is 5/12. This makes sense because when we add all the fractions up (4/12 + 3/12 + 5/12) it comes out to 12/12, which is the whole book.

So, the answer to this question is Sarah read 5/12 of the book at night.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

The whole book - the amount that is still left to read = total amount that she read

1 - 1/4 = (4-1) / 4 = 3/4

3/4 is what she read in total

The total amount she read - the amount she read in the morning = the amount she read at night.

3/4 - 1/3 = (9-4) / 12 = 5/12

5/12 of the book is the amount Sarah read at night.