"A house divided against itself cannot stand."
-Abraham Lincoln

But hopefully you can stand my division lesson (and puns).

Hello again, and welcome back! This lesson is basically an extension of the last one because division is just the opposite of multiplication.

When dividing something, the notation can show up as 8÷4, 8/4, or 8
4

Division means you take the first number and find how many times the second number fits into it. For example, how many times does 4 fit into 8?

There are lots of ways to think about math, so I'll show you another one. You can go with the one you like better.

Either way, you find that 4 goes into 8 exactly two times, so 8÷4=2.

There's one little thing that makes division different than multiplication. With multiplication, your answer will always be a whole number (unless you multiply using fractions or decimals). By this I mean your answers will be numbers like 2 or 12:

1×2=2 } These equations use
3×4=12} whole #s

And never something like 2.5, unless you use fractions or decimals in the equation:

0.5×5=2.5 } 0.5 and 2.5 have decimals.

The basic idea is that if you multiply whole numbers like 3, 54, 17, 2, etc., you will always have a whole number answer.

This is not true for division!

Some numbers don't fit evenly into others, so even if you divide the whole number 5 by the whole number 2, you will end up with 2.5, a decimal, or 2 1/2, a fraction.

When you're dividing numbers that don't split evenly, it's easier to solve the equation like this:

From here, you have two options:

Or

Why do these methods work? If you want to know, leave a request in the comments and I'll post some lessons on fractions and decimals. :)

These methods make division with decimal or fraction answers easier. It also makes long division easier. What if you're solving 3,711÷3 ? Set it up the same way.

The more you practice this, the better you'll get!

👉Some quick vocabulary: The number you're dividing is called the dividend. The number you divide it by is the divisor. And the answer is the quotient.
Dividend÷divisor=quotient

👉Whole numbers are also called integers.

Now to prove that division is the opposite of multiplication. Do you remember the way we picked apart the multiplication method in the last lesson? Division is very similar!

You can divide the numbers in 3,711 into 1000s place, 100s place, 10s place, and 1s place. So the number 3,711 is basically the numbers 3000, 700, 10, and 1 added together.

Dividing 3,711 by 3 is the same as (3000/3)+(700/3)+(10/3)+(1/3).

So we look at 3000÷3 first.

Now move on to 700÷3

Now for the 10's place

And at last the one's place.

There you have it! I hope you enjoyed this lesson in division. I remember when I was a little kid, I liked it better than multiplication. Whatever your preference, keep up the good math work!

:) Albino Kiwi