Chapter 6: Rationals: Multiplication, Division, and Applications


Millard Lewis and John Moore

Day Four: Dividing Fractions

Day One of our unit focused on multiplying decimals. Yesterday we worked on multiplicative inverses (remember that the product of a number and its multiplicative inverse is 1).

When we look at dividing fractions, we will not use the long division we learned to divide whole numbers with (when we divide decimals we will revisit long division). Instead, we will see how the two previous topics relate.

When we divide fractions, we take the multiplicative inverse of the second fraction and the numtiply by the first. To better see this, let's look at an example from Geometer's Sketchpad.

Are you ready to try some on your own? Great! Print up this page and answer all the problems involving dividing fractions. Good luck!