Video Transcript
Convert the fraction fifty-three tenths to a mixed number.
We’re starting with this fraction fifty-three tenths, and we would call that an improper fraction because the numerator is greater than the denominator. We want fifty-three tenths to be a mixed number. A mixed number has a whole number portion and a fraction portion. You can visualize it like this.
We’ll have some combination of whole numbers and then a remaining fractional part. The denominator of our fraction is 10 which means when we convert pieces to whole numbers from this fraction, we’ll be converting 10 out of 10 plus some number out of 10 for the fractional piece.
For the whole-number piece, we’ll need to ask ourselves what can we multiply 10 by to get as close to 53 as possible without going over. 10 times five gives us 50, and that’s pretty close to 53. If we multiply 10 times six, we would get 60, and 60 is larger than 53. So multiplying by six doesn’t work.
This means that our whole number to convert this fraction would be five. To find the fraction, or the remainder, here, we would take the 53 that we’ve already been given as the numerator and subtract 50, like this. Here the 50 represents the whole number that we’re working with. When you subtract 50 from 53, we get three as our remainder.
This means that our fractional piece is three-tenths. If we put our whole number and our fraction together, we will have five and three-tenths. Five and three-tenths is the mixed-number representation of the improper fraction 53 over 10.
