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A principal evenly distributes 6 reams of copy paper to 8 fifth-grade teachers.

a. How many reams of paper does each fifth-grade teacher receive? Explain how you know using pictures, words, or numbers.
b. If there were twice as many reams of paper and half as many teachers, how would the amount each teacher receives change? Explain how you know using pictures, words, or numbers.

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Answer: We start with 6 reams of copy paper and 8 teachers.

a) if we distribute the paper equally between all the teachers, then each teacher receive 6/8 (here we are dividing the total number of reams by the number of people that we are are splitting it). but 6/8 is less than one, so we must open the reams in order to split them.

b) If there were twice as many reams of paper, then we will have 2*6 = 12 reams of paper, and if there where half the number of teachers, then we have 8/2 = 4 teachers.

Doing the same procedure as before, we have 12 teams for 4 teachers, then each teacher has 12/4 = 3 reams

before, each teacher received 6/8 reams, and now, each one receive 3.

if we want to know the change, we need to see the difference between these numbers, so 3 - 6/8 = 3*8/8 - 6/8

notice that i am multiplying the 3 by 8/8, this is one, but this way i can have the same denominator in both numbers.

24/8 - 6/8 = 18/8 = 9/4 = 8/4 + 1/4 = 2 + 1/4

so each teacher receive 2 + 1/4 reams than before.

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