Video Transcript
Olivia is learning to divide using the distributive property. Which expression is missing?
We start with 27 divided by three. And we see that that is broken into two different expressions, one we don’t know. And then that’s added to nine divided by three. Nine divided by three equals three. And whatever the missing expression is, it’s equal to six. And then we add six plus three to equal nine.
Back to our missing expression, because we’re dividing 27 by three, both expressions should have dividing by three as one of their components. Our expression is something divided by three. The last part takes nine and divides it by three. If we take nine away from 27, we’re left with 18. Nine plus 18 equals 27. And that means we can use 18 as our missing piece in the expression.
Is 18 divided by three equal to six? Yes, it is. By breaking 27 into smaller pieces and dividing each of those pieces by three, we’ve used the distributive property to divide 27 by three. Our missing expression, 18 divided by three.