Introduction
Working with numbers that aren’t whole invites an altered approach while utilizing skills you may already know. There are many ways to represent numbers that aren’t whole, one being fractions.
As a quick review, fractions are a representation of non-whole numbers in which a portion is described over a total amount of pieces that make a whole. The reciprocal of a fraction is just the flipped version where the numerator becomes the denominator.
For example, imagine a pie is divided into 8 slices. That means one whole pie is equivalent to 8 slices. If you take 6 slices, that means you took 6 out of the 8 slices. This can be represented using this fraction:
It’s important to note that the denominator is not limited to just one number; it may be anything. This also means that a fraction’s value can be represented by several other fractions (more on that in Module 3: Decimals).
The reciprocal of the example would be:
Fractions are also another way to denote a division statement:
