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Rounding whole numbers word problems

Sal solves word problems by rounding whole numbers to the nearest ten, hundred, or thousand.

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Video transcript

- [Instructor] At a barbecue to celebrate the end of the soccer season, 1,354 hot dogs were served. Round the number of hot dogs to the nearest 10. Alright, let me just rewrite the number, 1,354. Now let's just remember our places. I could write it like that. This is the ones. This is the tens. This is the hundreds place, and this is the thousands place. Now they want to round the number of hot dogs to the nearest 10. So round it to the nearest 10 here, and so right now we have five tens, but in order to round, we have to look to the next smallest place, so we'll look to the ones, and we have four ones here, and so because this number is less than five, so because this is less than five, we round down. So less than five, so we're gonna round down. If you round down, you get to exactly five tens, or you say 1,350. We have rounded to the nearest 10, 1,350 hot dogs. Let's do another one. So here we're told the attendance at a local basketball game was 8,643 people. Round the attendance to the nearest 100, and like always, pause this video and see if you can figure that out. Let's see, 8,643. We wanna round to the nearest 100, so we go one place to the right of that, and we say, okay, is this greater than or less than? Is this less than five or greater than or equal to five? Since it is less than five, so this is less than five, so because of that, we round down. And so we were going to round down to 8,600, so we have rounded to the nearest 100, 8,600 people. Let's do one more. The city of Joyville has 87,388 residents. Round the number of people who live in Joyville to the nearest 1,000. So we have 87,388. We wanna round to the nearest 1,000, so once again, we go one place to the right. We see that it is less than five, and so we're gonna round down. We are gonna round down to 87,000. That is the nearest 1,000, 87,000. Now since all of the examples, we ended up rounding down, let me just show you what would have happened when we round up. If it was 87,588, well, once again, we are rounding to the nearest 1,000. You go one place to the right, and you say, "Hey, this is five or larger." So in this case, you would round up, so you would round the thousands up to 88,000 in this situation. So you go one space to the right, one place value to the right. If that is less than five, then you round down. If it is five or greater, you round up.