Video Transcript
Complete the following: What
divided by 12 equals zero.
This might seem like an unusual
division because it ends with the answer zero. And it’s not often that we see a
division that ends in zero. At the start of this number
sentence, we can see we’ve got a missing number that we need to complete. What number if we divide it by 12
would give an answer zero? To help us find this missing
number, we can start at the end of this division and work backwards, because we know
that the inverse or the opposite of division is multiplication. If we divide a number by 12 and we
have zero lots of 12, then to find that missing number, we just need to find zero
lots of 12.
We can use our knowledge of
multiplying by zero to help us here because we know that any number multiplied by
zero equals zero. And that’s how we know our missing
number must be zero. This reminds us of a fact we know
to do with working with zero in divisions. Dividing zero by any number at all
always results in zero. And as we know our answer is zero,
we know the number we divided by 12 to get there must also be zero. Zero divided by 12 equals zero. Our missing number is zero.
