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Yesterday, Donald had 16 1/6 pounds of granola in the pantry. This morning, he and his family ate 9 5/6 pounds of granola for breakfast. How much granola is left?

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User XzKto
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1 Answer

4 votes

Answer:

See below.

Explanation:

This is just a subtraction problem, but with fractions involved.

And they make it easy by making the denominators the same, so we don't even have to convert.

You're already familiar with "borrowing" when you do a subtraction problem. You can borrow fractions too, and here we need to. Because we can't "take away" 5 sixths from 1 sixth, right?

So we need to borrow some "sixths" from that whole number 16. You should recognize that there are 6 sixths in "1". 1 = 6/6 Agree with that?

So you borrow a "1" from 16, but you call it six sixths. Then add that to the one sixth that's already there, to get seven sixths. And now you can subtract five sixths from it. It looks like this:

  • 16 1/6 is the 15 (6 + 1)/6 Same as: 15 7/6
  • - 9 5/6 same as: - 9 5/6 - 9 5/6
  • 6 2/6

Simplify to 6 1/3, of course. That's how many pounds are left.

I hope all the words helped you understand. Take care.

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