Dividing a whole number by a decimal on a number line

Learn this with friends

Maths5th grade math1:543 check-ins

About this video

This video finds 2 ÷ 0.4 on a number line marked in tenths. Starting at 0 and making jumps of 4/10, it takes exactly five jumps to reach 2, so 2 ÷ 0.4 = 5.

You'll be able to

  • use jumps on a number line to divide a whole number by a decimal.
  • explain 2 ÷ 0.4 as 'how many jumps of 4/10 make 2'.

Key words

number line
A line with numbers in order, used here to count jumps.
tenth
One of 10 equal spaces between 0 and 1 on the number line.
equal chunks
Pieces that are all exactly the same size.
Transcript

- [Instructor] What we want to do in this video is figure out what two divided by 0.4 is, or two divided by 4/10. So why don't you pause this video and try to figure out what it is. And as a little bit of a hint, think about two on the number line and think about how many jumps of 4/10 do you have to make starting at zero to get to two, to figure out what two divided by 4/10 is.

All right, now let's do it together. And as I mentioned in my hint, let's just think about how many jumps of 4/10 we have to make to go from zero to two. And on this number line, each of these, this is a 10th right over here because we can see there's 10 equal spaces between zero and one.

So let's take some jumps of 4/10. So if we start at zero, we can make, let's see there's 1/10, 2/10, 3/10, 4/10. That's one jump. I'll number that. And then we can make our next jump of one, two, three, 4/10. Guess that's right over there. That's two jumps. Then our next jump will take us right over there.

So once again I'm just making equal jumps of 4/10. Then my next jump will take us one, two, three, 4/10 further. So that gets us right over there. We've taken four jumps. And then it looks like our fifth jump gets us there. One, two, three, 4/10. Yup. Our fifth jump gets us exactly to two.

So we've taken five jumps of 4/10 to go from zero to two or another way to think about it is if you were to divide two into equal chunks of 4/10, you could divide into five equal chunks of 4/10. Or you could make five equal jumps to go from five equal jumps of 4/10 to go from zero to two.

Video © Khan Academy, used under CC BY-NC-SA. Watch on Khan Academy. Puzzicle is not affiliated with Khan Academy.