Division Illustration for Equal Sharing

  • Thread starter Thread starter Outblaze
  • Start date Start date
Join the discussion
Registration is free. Ask a follow-up in this thread, or start your own.
1 reply · 3K views
Outblaze
Messages
10
Reaction score
0
Suppose that 3.2 units of Awesome are used in 40% of a cake. How many units of Awesome are used in a whole?

The answer is 3.2 ÷ 0.4 = 8

What I need to know is how to DRAW the question as equal division and not repeated subtraction.

I attached a pic of what I think it looks like. Tell me if I'm headed in the right direction.
 

Attachments

  • awesomeness.jpg
    awesomeness.jpg
    23.7 KB · Views: 467
Physics news on Phys.org
The answer is easy to get using a proportion:
[tex]\frac{3.2}{.4} = \frac{x}{1}[/tex]
==> x = 8

That apparently isn't what you want. One possible way to go is to realize that 1.6 units of awesome are used in 20% (or one-fifth) of a cake, so if you have 5 equal chunks of the cake, you'll have 5 X 1.6 = 8 units of Awesome.