Question

A piece of wire is $\dfrac{7}{8}\,m$ long and is broken into two pieces. One piece was $\dfrac{1}{4}\,m$ long. How long is the other piece?

Answer 1

Hint: The problem can be solved using simple mathematics. Since the wire is broken into two pieces and the original and length of one of its pieces is given, we can simply calculate the length of this piece from the total length to get the length of another piece. So, simply subtraction would help us solve the question.

Complete step-by-step answer:
It is written in the question that the total length of the piece of wire is $\dfrac{7}{8}\,m$
Further it is broken into two pieces. The length of one piece is given as $\dfrac{1}{4}\,m$
Now we know that the sum of two pieces is equal to the total length of the actual wire.
$\dfrac{1}{4}\,m$$ + $Length of second piece$ = $$\dfrac{7}{8}\,m$
Length of second piece$ = \dfrac{7}{8} - \dfrac{1}{4} = \dfrac{{7 - 2}}{8} = \dfrac{5}{8}$
So Length of second piece is $\dfrac{5}{8}$ meters

Note: If we were told that the wire broke into two pieces, then we would have used a simple shortcut method.
Suppose the length of wire was $ = $$\dfrac{7}{8}\,m$ and it got broken into two equal pieces. So now the length of one of both the pieces can be obtained by dividing original length by $2$
So the length of each piece $ = \dfrac{7}{{8 \times 2}} = \dfrac{7}{{16}}$ meters.