Video Transcript
A person cycled 73.33 metres in a hundred seconds. How many metres did that person cycle in one second?
In this problem, we’re given some information about somebody riding their bike. We’re told the distance that they travelled and also the time it took them. They travelled 73.33 metres. And this took him 100 seconds. We need to use the information that we’ve been given to calculate the number of metres that the person cycled in one second. To calculate the answer, we need to find one hundredth of the distance that they travelled which is 73.33 metres. And to find one hundredth of a number, we need to divide it by 100.
At that moment our number has seven tens, three ones, three tenths, and three hundredths. And when we divide any number by one hundred the digits shift two places to the right. So they move two columns to the right. So instead of being worth seven tens, the number seven is now worth seven tenths. And our three ones also shift two columns too. Instead of being worth three ones, there now worth three hundredths. Three tenths are now worth three thousandths. And the digit in the hundredth column shifts to the ten thousandth column.
To show what all these digits are, we need to make sure we included decimal point and zero as a place holder. That way we can see where all the decimal places are. We needed to solve the problem. We had to find one hundredth of 73.33 metres. We also remembered that when we divide any number by 100, the digits shift two places to the right. So we used a place value grid to help us. The number of metres that the cycle is travelled in one second was 0.7333 metres which is just over 73 centimetres.
