Maria J. answered • 05/19/22
Making Sense of Math! Elementary and Special Ed Tutor, M.Ed.
Hi,
I hope I can make sense of this problem for you. Let's take a look at the problem without numbers. We know that 1/3 of a foot is about the length of a hand, and our board is 7 feet long, as tall as a pro basketball player. So from that picture, we know we are going to have many pieces the length of a hand!
Now let's look at our problem, the board is cut into pieces. What operation would we use to cut the board into smaller pieces of a certain length? Division. So our equation for this problem will be 7 divided by 1/3. When dividing by fractions I use the rule keep/change/flip. Keep the first number (the dividend), change the division to multiplication and flip the divisor, the fraction.
Our original equation 7 divided by 1/3 is now 7 x 3/1 or 7 x 3=21
So our answer is 21 pieces. When we started we determined that we were going to have a lot of pieces from our original board, which fits with our answer.
Hope that helps!!
