Dividing whole numbers & fractions: t-shirts

a baby's t-shirt requires 4/5 yards of fabric or 4/5 of a yard of fabric how many t-shirts can be made from 48 yards so we want to do is we essentially want to say how many groups of 4/5 of a yard can we make with 48 yards so you literally view this is we want to take 48 yards so we want to take 48 yards and divide it into groups of four fifths of a yard and say how many groups are there because each of those groups can make one babies t-shirt if you give me 4/5 of a yard one babies t-shirt so the number of groups of 4/5 is the number of babies t-shirts now when we divide by a fraction we just have to remember that that is the same thing that is completely equivalent to multiplying two multiplying times the reciprocal of the fraction so if we have 4/5 here that'll be 5 over 4 the reciprocal now this still might say hey I have a whole number here on the fraction you just have to remember any whole number can be written as a fraction this is the same thing as 48 over 1 times 5 over 4 now we could just multiply it out at this point figure out what 48 times 5 is and that'll be over 4 but that'll only get big numbers and it'll be hard to kind of divide and all that but we could divide it this stage right here we could divide the numerator and the denominator by 4 or we could say look this is going to be equal to 48 times 5 whatever that is over 4 now let's divide the numerator by 4 well we could divide 48 by 4 and we will get 12 and we could whatever did the numerator we have to do the denominator so if we divide 4 by 4 we get 1 so then we're left with 12 times 5 which is equal to 60 12 times 5 which is equal to 60 over 1 which is the exact same thing as 60 so you can actually make 60 children's or babies t-shirts from 48 yards if each of them use 4 fifths of a yard