Video Transcript
What number is missing? What-quarters and a three-quarters
make one.
Can you see where the number is
missing from our sentence? It’s the top number or the
numerator in a fraction. So by finding this missing
numerator, we’re going to turn this sentence into an addition. We can put two fractions together
to make one. And underneath our sentence, we’re
given a fraction strip to help us. Now we know that with any fraction
strip, when we look at the whole amount, it’s worth one, one whole. And if we look for a moment at this
particular fraction strip, we can see that it’s been split up into four equal parts
or quarters. Each part is worth one-quarter, and
there are one-, two-, three-, four-quarters altogether. So we could write four-quarters
equals one. They’re both worth exactly the
same.
If this was a chocolate bar and you
broke up each of the four pieces and ate them all, you’d have eaten one whole
chocolate bar or four-quarters. Now if we want to make one whole
just like this sentence tells us, we’re going to need to make four-quarters. The second fraction in our addition
sentence is three-quarters. So, how many quarters are we going
to need to add to three-quarters to make those four-quarters that we need? Well, if we already have
three-quarters, we only need one more quarter, don’t we? We know that four-quarters are the
same as one whole. And so if we want to make one,
we’re really looking to make four-quarters. And so we know we can say one-
quarter and three-quarters make one. The missing number or the numerator
in our fraction was one.
