Arithmetic Grade Four

Lesson Seventeen: Division Review


Here's another story word problem for division:

   There were 81 chocolate bars arranged into
   9 equal stacks. How many chocolate bars
   were in each stack?

We could represent this story problem with a picture like this:

    _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _ 
    _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _ 
    _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _ 
    _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _ 
    _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _ 
    _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _ 
    _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _ 
    _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _ 
    _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _ 


Each little line represents one chocolate bar. There are nine stacks and there are nine chocolate bars in each stack. So, from this picture we can figure out that the answer to our problem is nine.

We could also write the following number sentence for the story problem:
 
    81 / 9 = 9


Here's another word story problem for you to think about:


    Jill had 30 basketballs and 5 ball bags to
    put them in. If she puts the same number of
    balls into each bag, then how many balls 
    will she put into each bag?

We could make a picture like this to represent this story problem:

    o   o   o   o   o
    o   o   o   o   o
    o   o   o   o   o
    o   o   o   o   o
    o   o   o   o   o
    o   o   o   o   o   

Our picture has five columns (one for each bag). Each column contains 6 little o's (the o's represent basketballs). Six is the answer to our problem.

We could also write the following number sentence for the story problem:
 
    30 / 5 = 6

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