How do you calculate volume with cubes of fraction lengths?
I'm doing some exercises on Khanacademy.org and I keep having trouble with one exercise. The questions are like this: how many $1/4$cm cubes does it take to fill a prism if the prism is $1$cm $\times$ $7/4$cm $\times$ $2$cm? I consistently get these wrong and Khan academy's explanations aren't working for me. I've tried converting all the side lengths to multiples(?) of $1/4$, such as $4/4 \times 7/4 \times 8/4$ and multiplying but I still get the wrong answer. How do I calculate this?
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$\begingroup$You have to find for each side, independently, how many cubes would fit in that side.
$1/4$ fits $4$ times in the side $1$.
$1/4$ fits $7$ times in the side $7/4$.
$1/4$ fits $8$ times in the side $2$.
The answer is then $4\times7\times8 = 224$
Another way of answering would be by starting to write everything in multiples of $1/4$ like you did, and then remove all the $/4$ from the denominators. That would leave you with the question:
How many cubes of side $1$ fit into a rectangle of sides $4\times7\times8$? And then yes, you multiply.
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