Skills: Reciprocal

Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Today, we were assigned to do another blog post. We have to put the definition of the word reciprocal, explain how it's used in mathematics and show 2 examples.

Reciprocal, also called multiplicative inverse, is a number that you multiply so that the result equals 1. The easiest way to find it is to just flip the fraction over.

We use reciprocal or multiplicative inverse in math because it is faster, quicker and easier to understand. it can be used in a ratio table.

Example:

3/4 divided by 3/5
This question means - how many groups of 3/5 are in 3/4?
The reciprocal of 3/4 is 4/3 and the reciprocal of 3/5 is 5/3.

The answer is going to be more than 1 because 3/4 is larger than 3/5.
The ratio table:


















3/5 divided by 3/3
This question means - how many groups of 3/4 are in 3/5?
The reciprocal of 3/5 is 5/3 and the reciprocal of 3/4 is 4/3.

The answer is going to be less than 1 because 3/5 is smaller than 3/4.
The ratio table:

0 comments:

Post a Comment