Video Transcript
Which of these can we read as two
groups of eight objects? Two plus eight, two divided by
eight, eight take away two, or two multiplied by eight.
We’re given four different possible
answers here. What’s the same about them and
what’s different? What can you see? They all contain the numbers two
and eight. This is interesting because our
question mentions the numbers two and eight too. But we can see each of our answers
has a different symbol. There’s an addition symbol, a
division symbol, a subtraction symbol, and a multiplication symbol.
To answer the question, we need to
think then about what these symbols mean because one of our possible answers is a
way of representing two groups of eight objects. We might expect two groups of eight
to look something like this. There are two groups, and each of
them has got eight dots. Now, which of our symbols could we
use to represent groups of something? We know if we add two numbers
together, we combine them. So two plus eight would mean the
total of two and another eight.
When we subtract one number from
another, the first number gets smaller. This isn’t a way of showing groups
of a number either. And we know we use the division
symbol when we want to share a number or split it up or divide it. But we know we can use the
multiplication symbol to represent several lots of a number or several groups of the
same number. So when we see two multiplied by
eight written out, we know this means two lots of eight or, as it says in the
question, two groups of eight objects. We can represent two groups of
eight objects by writing two multiplied by eight.
