Arithmetic Grade Four

Lesson Eighteen: Division Review

Here's another story word problem for division: 

  There were 72 children and a coach wanted to
  get them to stand in 8 lines with the same number
  of children in each line. How many children
  would wind up in each line?
We could represent this story problem with a picture like this:

We could actually draw pictures of children if we wanted to take a lot of time, but its easier just to draw little squares. We have eight rows and a total of 72 squares. This means that there will be nine squares in each row and that's the number of children that will wind up standing in each row.

We could also write the following number sentence for the story problem: 
 
    72 / 8 = 9

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


   There were fourteen donuts on a big plate.
   Joe decided to move these donuts to two
   smaller plates and he put an equal number
   of the donuts on each plate. How many 
   donuts will go on each plate?
We could make a picture like this to represent this story problem:

Our picture has two rows (one for each plate). We take turns adding squares (each one representing a donut) until we reach a total of 14 squares. Then we count the squares in a row and we find that there are 7 squares in a row which gives us the answer to the problem.

We could also write the following number sentence for the story problem: 
 
    14 / 2 = 7

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