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Ways to represent division

Sal explains different ways to represent 18 divided by 2.  Created by Sal Khan and Monterey Institute for Technology and Education.

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Video transcript

What expression can be used to show dividing 18 boxes into two equals stacks? Find the expression three times using different ways to write division. Find the value of the expression. So let's just do this top part right here. We have 18 boxes, and we want to divide them into two equals stacks, so we want to divide 18 by 2. And the way we would write this, and we'll think a little bit more about what this means, we could write this as 18 over 2. This means 18 divided by 2. We could write it as 18 divided by 2, just like that, or we could write it as 18 divided by 2. Now before we evaluate it, they say find the value of the expression. Let's think about what this means. We have 18 boxes and we want to divide them into two equal stacks. Let me draw 18 boxes. So I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12-- almost there-- 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18. So those are my 18 boxes, and I divide them into two equals stacks or two equal groups. So if I want to divide these into two different groups that have the same number of boxes, I could just eyeball it, and say, well, let's make these top ones one group. Let's make that one of the groups, and let's making these bottom ones another group. And these are equal groups. How many do we have in each group? Well, in the top one, we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and in the bottom one we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. So we've split it into two groups of nine. So 18 divided into two equal groups is equal to 9, or 18 divided by 2 is equal to 9, or 2 goes into 18 nine times.