What is 21/4 as a mixed number

Answer 1

Hello!

This is actually a pretty easy one. By "mixed" they mean in the form like "1 1/2" instead of "3/2". So it's a "mix" of whole numbers and fractions.

Here we have 21/4. To convert it to mixed we first need to know how many whole numbers we have. That's easy to figure out just divide 4 into 21. How many whole times does 4 go into 21? Well 5, because 5 x 4 = 20. It's not 6 because 6 x 4 = 24 and that would go over 21.

So we know 4 goes into 21 5 whole times. How much is left over? Well, 5 x 4 = 20 so there is 1 left over. One what? One 4th, or 1/4.

So we can now write it as a mixed number:

5 1/4

Is it correct? We can check our work by converting back and seeing if we get what we started with.

5 x 1/4 + 1/4 = 20/4 + 1/4 = 21/4

Yep, checks out - this is the correct answer!.

Hope that helps.

Oh the quick way to solve this is:

21/4 = 21 divided by 4 = 5 remainder 1 (one what? remember, it's 1/4ths). So even the quick way, we get:

21/4 = 5 1/4.

Hope that helps!