How to Understand Fractions

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Steve Jones, and I'm going to try and get you to understand fractions. Now first of all, a fraction is not a fixed number, it is a proportion, it's a part or how many parts of a whole thing. If the whole thing is a circle, it's like a piece a pie you might say. This is a fraction of the whole pie. If it's a bar like this, then it's a fraction of that bar. So if we look at this in particular, we would say well how much is this fraction, or what fraction is this? Well, lets do some quick drawing of a few dotted lines and we'll see that maybe we can get one, two, three, four, five, six of those in the whole. So this is one and then we've got one, two, three, four, five more. Altogether we've got six. So, out of six, this fraction is just one out of the six. And we write it one over six. That's fairly simple. So this fraction, that is one, two, three, four, five, would be five sixths. Alright? And obviously if we put them together, we know that one sixth plus five sixths will give us six sixths, which is just one. The whole thing. So this is what we mean by fraction. And here's another example. Here we have a fraction, I'm going to dot a line there and there and there and there. Now as you can see, we've got one, two, three, four, five, six. In fact we've got the same number of portions we had, as we had in the circle. But this time I've just got them arranged in a different way. I've still got one object. And if I look at these two here, I've got two parts here, out of the six altogether. So I've got two sixths. Well two sixths is, I could also draw a strong line there, and I've got, I've got one of these here and two there. So it's one out of three. So two sixths is the same as one third. And if I add together one third and two thirds, one third and the two thirds which I have below. So that's one third there. This is two, so it's, that's one third and this is two thirds. I add those together, I must get three thirds. And we know three thirds is one. So this very simply how to under, what, understand what the fractions really are."