Fractions

Often in life, whole amounts are not exactly what we need. A baker must use a little more than a cup of milk or part of a teaspoon of sugar; a carpenter might need less than a foot of wood. In this chapter, we work with numbers that describe parts of a whole — fractions — and build the skills to model, compare, and compute with them.

Sections

• Visualize Fractions — the meaning of fractions, modeling improper fractions and mixed numbers, converting between them, equivalent fractions, and locating and ordering fractions on the number line.
• Multiply and Divide Fractions — simplifying fractions, multiplying and dividing fractions, and simplifying expressions with a fraction bar.
• Multiply and Divide Mixed Numbers and Complex Fractions — multiplying and dividing mixed numbers, translating phrases into expressions, and simplifying complex fractions.
• Add and Subtract Fractions with Common Denominators — modeling and computing sums and differences of fractions that already share a denominator.
• Add and Subtract Fractions with Different Denominators — finding the least common denominator and adding or subtracting fractions after converting to it.
• Add and Subtract Mixed Numbers — adding and subtracting mixed numbers with common and different denominators.
• Solve Equations with Fractions — using the properties of equality, and the multiplication property of equality, to solve equations that contain fractions.

This chapter overview is adapted from Prealgebra 2e, Chapter 4 Introduction by Lynn Marecek, MaryAnne Anthony-Smith, and Andrea Honeycutt Mathis, © OpenStax, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Access the original for free at openstax.org. Changes: condensed the chapter introduction and recast the chapter outline as a section list.