Or noticed that your gas tank is half full? Both of these are fractions of the whole amount—a whole pound of meat, or a whole tank of gas. Fractions look a little like division expressions, but they aren't problems to be solved.
They are a way of expressing an amount. Like numbers, fractions tell you how much you have of something. We write it like that because the pizza has 8 slices The bottom number, 8 , stayed the same, since the pizza is still divided into the same number of slices. The top number changed, since we're talking about 2 slices now. There's less than 1 pizza, but more than 0 pizzas. That's why we use a fraction. Let's look at another example of how you can use fractions to show part of something.
As the morning goes on, the coffee pot gets emptier. We have less than 1 pot of coffee, but we still have more than 0 pots. We have a fraction of the pot left.
Every fraction has two parts: a top number and a bottom number. In math terms, these are called the numerator and the denominator. Don't worry too much about remembering those names. As long as you remember what each number means, you can understand any fraction.
As you saw in the slideshow, the bottom number , or denominator, is the number of parts a whole is divided into. We can raise exponential to another power, or take a power of a power. We can show this rule in the same way as we show that you can distribute multiplication over addition. You can see that it must be indeterminate, because you can come up with good reasons for it to be two different values. You can check out this applet to visualize this argument.
Home Threads Index About. We'll talk about two reasons today. The first has to do with how division is related to multiplication. Let's imagine for a second that division by zero is fine and dandy. We don't know what it is, but we'll just assume that x is some number. We can also look at this division problem as a multiplication problem asking what number, x , do we have to multiply by 0 to get 10?
Of course, there's no answer to this question since every number multiplied by zero is zero. Which means the operation of dividing by zero is what's dubbed "undefined. In other words, as we divide 1 by increasingly small numbers—which are closer and closer to zero—we get a larger and larger result. In the limit where the denominator of this fraction actually becomes zero, the result would be infinitely large.
Which is yet another very good reason that we can't divide by zero. Wrap Up OK, that's all the math we have time for today. Thanks for reading, math fans! Apple addition and infinity lightbulb images from Shutterstock. He provides clear explanations of math terms and principles, and his simple tricks for solving basic algebra problems will have even the most math-phobic person looking forward to working out whatever math problem comes their way.
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