Expert: Lynn Houston - 6/7/2010

Question
Math is not my best subject and am having trouble understanding my daughter's math problem. I will try and draw the example.
"Marlee drew the number line. What numeral goes in the denominator of the fraction to name the point on the line?"
<-+-+-+-+-+-+-*-+-+-+-+>
 0                   1
The asterick is where they highlighted on the graph for the problem.
Thank you.

Answer
I'm not sure if the drawing came out accurately, but I'll explain how to do it so if it's not accurate, then you'll still know how to do it.

What I see is a number line with 0 at the start and 6 tick marks away is the 1.  One tick mark after that is the asterisk.  Since there are 6 tick marks between 0 and 1, each section is 1/6 of the distance.  If there are more tick marks, just count the number of marks from 0 to 1 and then each mark is 1/x of the value 0 to 1.  So if there were 8 marks, each one would be 1/8.  If there were 10, each one would be 1/10.

Therefore, if the asterisk is 1 mark after the 1, the value at that tick mark is 1 1/6 or in just fraction format 7/6.  If the asterisk were 2 marks after the 1 then it would be 1 2/6.  3 marks would be 1 3/6, etc.

Make sense?