Question

Sophia buys 4/5 pound of sunflower seeds. She eats 1/10 pound of seeds each

day. How many days will it take Sophia to eat all the sunflower seeds?

Answer 1

Let's use a simpler example to see why we're going to divide these fractions. If you buy 10 cookies and eat 2 a day, it would take you 5 days to eat them all, right? This can also be shown by saying that 10 total ÷ 2 per day = 5 days.

So applying that to the problem, we would have (4/5) total ÷ (1/10) per day = # of days to eat the sunflower seeds.

When dividing fractions remember that you can multiply by the reciprocal of the second fraction to carry out the process. (Sometimes called keep change flip, or keep change change, etc.)

Basically we can do (4/5) x (10/1) instead of trying to divide, which is a lot easier because when we multiply fractions we just go straight across the top and bottom. So overall we get 40/5 = 8 days.