Jasmine wanted to cut some ribbon into 4 pieces, each 3 2/5 feet long. How big a piece of ribbon did she need to start with?

Question

Second part of the question.

when she went to the fabric store, they only had enough ribbon for her to make 2 1/2 pieces that were as long as she wanted. How much ribbon did the fabric store have?

Answer 1

If each piece is 3⅖ ft. and the store had enough ribbon for 2½ of those pieces, the fabric store must have had 2½ × length of a piece (ft.) of ribbon.

Substitute 3⅖ for "length of a piece" and you get: 2½ × 3⅖ ft.

You may find it necessary to convert the mixed numbers here to improper fractions to perform the calculations. To do this, simply multiply the whole part of the mixed number by the denominator of the fractional part and add that result to the numerator (the whole part is discarded after combining) e.g. 4⅗ becomes 23 / 5.

Once you have done this to both terms, the expression should look like this: 5/2 × 17/5.

To multiply these fractions, simply multiply the numerators to get the numerator of the product and the denominators for the denominator.

Don't forget to reduce!

If you convert the result back into a mixed number it should be 8½ ft.