The Relationship between Fractions and Percentages
Fractions Exercises - One Number as a Fraction of Another Comparing Fractions & Percentages Simplifying Fractions Large Number Fractions
Fractions
Imagine baking a cake. Once you start cutting the cake, you are cutting it into slices or fractions of the whole cake. If a cake can be cut into eight slices, then each of those slices represent 1/8 of the cake.
Cutting a cake is a good way of seeing something split into fractions. We can apply fractions to things we can’t see as well:
On Wednesday, 56 people visited the Have a Bite cafe. On Thursday, the number had fallen to 42. Express the drop in visitors as a fraction.
In order to do this, we need to pick a number which will go into both 42 and 56. 7 will go into both numbers but how many times?
42 ÷ 7 = 6
56 ÷ 7 = 8
42 out of 56 is 6/8 of the total number of visitors who went to the café on Wednesday. But we still need to express the drop in visitors as a fraction:
56 – 42 = 14
14 ÷ 7 = 2
Therefore the number of visitors on Thursday was 2/8 less than it was on Wednesday.
Click here to learn about simplifying fractions.
Click here to learn more about fractions and big numbers.