The Easiest Way to Understand Fraction

In this post, let's learn and understand what is meant by a fraction.

By a simple definition, a fraction means a part of a whole thing. A whole thing can be anything. It can be yourself in which your head is just a part or a fraction of your whole body.

It can be an earth where an ocean is just a fraction or part of it, or an African continent which is just a part of the whole dry land on it.

It is normally express mathematically as a ratio between the part or parts of the whole thing and the whole thing itself and is given by this simple expression: part/whole thing. For example: 1/10 means one out of ten, or one-tenth.

But, let's make things very simple and easy in order for you to understand it easily and qickly.

Now let's consider the picture beside. It's a small bunch of banana taken from the whole-big bunch which is not shown here.

From this bunch, let's take only one piece out of it for our further explanations of what a fraction really is. But before going down to the next pictures, let's understand that this one piece of banana shown in the picture below is just a fraction of the small bunch.

This small bunch contains 13 pieces of bananas if you count it properly. If we relate the second picture (one banana) to the first picture (bunch with 13 pieces of bananas), then we can say that 1/13 is the fractional expression of the relationship of the two pictures with respect to the small bunch with 13 pieces of bananas.

To simplify this explanation further, let's consider another picture - the third one below.

Now, our reference is no longer the bunch, but a piece of a banana as shown in this second picture.

If you look at the third picture, a piece of banana is sliced, thus, dividing it into two equal parts. Either part is called a fraction of the whole piece of banana which is now composed of two equal parts. We can express this single part mathematically as 1/2 (read as one-half).

Either the one part on the left or the one part of the right is said to be one-half (or mathematcally expressed as 1/2).

So, at least this time you already have an idea of what is meant by a fraction and how to express it mathematically.

The fourth picture shows the same piece of banana, but this time, it's divided into four equal parts. The whole piece of banana is now composed of four equal parts.

So, if you take one part, as shown in the left side of the fifth picture, then that part is called one-fourth, expressed as 1/4, and the remaining parts that is shown in the right side of the fifth picture is called three-fourth, or mathematically, expressed as 3/4.

We can also make other fractional expression like, 2/4 as shown in the sixth picture, taking 2 part from the whole four equal parts.

The fraction 2/4 is just the same as 1/2. To find out why, that would be one of the most important topics that I am going to teach you in the other separate post later.

However, one of the required skills to easily handle fractions is your ability to do the basic operations: addition, subtraction, division and multiplication.

If you don't have any problem on these basic mathematical operations, then surely, it's easy for your to do the same with fractions.

Once, fractions are fully understood, doing the basic operation is not a problem.

So, before going forward, I would like you to answer some basic questions in the next post here, to help us determine whether you have already understood all about fractions that we have just discussed above.

If you have any comment/suggestion on the above tutorial on fractions, please kindly leave your comments below.

I will get back to you within 24 hours.

Thank you very much.