Question

Mrs. Garcia was required to write down the cost of the tour for the students and chaperones. For the chaperones, she wrote: 6 people($0) = $0. Explain why this expression is not an example of the identity property of multiplication.

Answer 1

Sample response: The identity property states that the original number will stay the same when you add 0 or multiply by 1. This situation is an example of the multiplicative property of zero, that is multiplying by 0 results in 0.

Answer 2

The identity property of multiplication is also known as the multiplication property of 1.

This states that the result of multiplying any real number by 1 is the number itself.

Here, the teacher wrote 6 people($0) = $0

This will be 0 as any number multiplied by 0 is 0. And here there is not 1. So, this expression is not an example of the identity property of multiplication.