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Writing fraction division story problems

Darryl spent 24 1/4 hours writing a novel chapter, and we explore situations where dividing 24 1/4 by 3/4 is meaningful. Two examples include calculating the number of days spent writing with 45-minute daily sessions and determining the time spent illustrating if it's 3/4 as long as writing. Creative thinking helps uncover more scenarios. Created by Sal Khan.

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Video transcript

- [Instructor] We're told that Darryl spent 24 1/4 hours writing a chapter of a novel. And then they ask us, what are some things that 24 1/4 divided by 3/4 could represent in this context? So my understanding of this is they really just want us to be a little bit creative about what division by a fraction could represent in a given context. So, well, one, I encourage you to pause your video and think about that a little bit before I think about it. But one thing I think about is, well, if I took 24 1/4, and if I were to divide it into chunks of 3/4 of an hour because this is in hours, how many chunks would I have? So this could represent, let's say that he spent, he spent 45 minutes, which is the same thing of 3/4 of an hour, 3/4 hours, of an hour, I should say, 3/4 of an hour each day. How many days, how many days did it take him, did it take? And then you could evaluate this, 24 1/4 divided by 3/4. We've talked about how to evaluate that in other videos. So that's one context. Another one could be some type of a comparison. So let's say that 24 1/4 is 3/4 of the amount of time that he spent doing something else. So let's say, so this is now a completely different context. I'm gonna put a line here. I'll do it in a different color just to make it clear it's a different context. So another one could be to justify doing this division, he spent 3/4 as long writing, writing as he spent illustrating, illustrating the chapter. And so then the question is how long did he spend illustrating? How long did he spend illustrating? Now, I really want you to think about this one. My brain, actually, this one takes a little bit longer for my brain to process. But when you think about it, if you divide by a fraction that is less than one, you're gonna get a number larger than the one that you're dealing with. Or another way to think about it, the time spent illustrating, time illustrating, I'll write it like this, the time illustrating times 3/4 should be equal to the time spent writing because it says he spent, or he spent, I forgot to write that, he spent 3/4 as long writing as he spent illustrating. So time illustrating times 3/4 should be time writing or 24 1/4. So if something times 3/4 is equal to 24 1/4, then 24 1/4 divided by 3/4 should be equal to time illustrating. So these are the two contexts that I can think of that might make sense, but you might be able to think of others.