What does it mean to divide?
So I'm in year 11 (10th grade for americans) and I have a really stupid question..
What does it mean to divide in maths?
I recently looked it up and it said "To divide means to slit the number up into equal groups". However, other sites said "To divide means to see how many times the divisor fits into the dividend"
Could someone please tell me which one it is?
Thanks, sorry for such a stupid question
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$\begingroup$It's both! Technically speaking, for real numbers $a,b,c$, with $b\neq 0$, we say that $a/b = c$ means that $a = b\cdot c$, i.e division is the inverse operation of multiplication. Now as to how we can interpret this operation, there are several possibilities, and you've hit on two of them.
$1.)$ "To divide means to split the number up into equal groups"
Suppose you have $15$ objects which you want to split into $3$ equal groups. Then we can think of $15/3 = 5$ as telling us that in order to have three equal groups we need each group to contain five items, because $15 = 5 + 5 + 5$.
$2.)$ "To divide means to see how many times the divisor fits into the dividend"
Now let's say we want to see how many times $3$ fits into $15$. Again we compute $15/3 = 5$, which we interpret as meaning that $3$ fits into $15$ five times, i.e. $15 = 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3$.
Note, however, that because $5 + 5 + 5$ and $3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3$ are both perfectly valid ways of thinking about $15$, neither way of thinking of division is necessarily better than the other, though depending on the context we may find one interpretation easier to think about/visualize that the other.
$\endgroup$ 1 $\begingroup$To ''divide'' is to split or place in pieces, think of it like this if you have a chocolate bar with 12 connected pieces and you break off 6 of them you can say you divided them by half because half of 12 is 6 so 12 dived by 2 (which is half) Is six.
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