Dividing whole numbers by fractions: word problem

Tracy is putting out decorative bowls of potpourri in each room of the hotel where she works she wants to fill each bowl with 1/5 of a can of potpourri if Tracy has four cans of potpourri in how many rooms can she place a bowl of potpourri so she has four cans and she wants to divide this four cans into groups of 1/5 of a can so if you have 4 or something and you're trying to divide it into groups of a certain amount you would divide by that amount per group so you want to divide you want to divide 4 by 1/5 you want to divide 4 cans of potpourri into groups of 1/5 so let's visualize this so let me draw let me draw one can of potpourri right over here so one can of potpourri can clearly be cut up into five fifths we have it right over here 1 2 3 4 5 so one can one can of potpourri can fill five bowls if you put a 5th in each bowl now we have 4 cans we have 4 cans so let me paste these so 2 3 & 4 so how many total bowls of potpourri can can Traci fill well she's got 4 cans so this is going to be equal to let me do this in the right color this is going to be equal to once again she has 4 cans and then for each of those cans she can fill 5 bowls of potpourri because each Bowl only requires 1/5 of those cans so this is going to be the same thing as 4 times 4 times 5 or we can even write this as 4 times 5 over 1 5 is the same thing as 5 over 1 which is the same thing as 4 times 5 4 times 5 which of course is equal to which is equal to 20 she can fill 20 cans or I should say she with her 4 cans she can fill 20 bowls of potpourri now just as a review here we already see we've already seen that dividing by a number is equal to multiplying by its reciprocal and we see that right over here dividing by 1/5 is the same thing as multiplying by the reciprocal of 1/5 which is 5 over 1 so we got she can fill up 20 bowls of potpourri