Question

What is $\dfrac{1}{3}$ of 18?

Answer 1

Hint: We solve this question based on fractions. The number above is known as the numerator, and the number below is known as the denominator. To find the fraction of any number, we must first convert the whole number into a fraction. So, we will convert 18 into fraction and then multiply it with $\dfrac{1}{3}$ to get the answer.

Complete step by step solution:
Let us first convert 18 into a fraction. If we use 1 as the denominator, we can convert any number to a fraction.
$\Rightarrow \dfrac{18}{1}$
Here the word ‘of’ denotes multiplication. So now that we've converted 18 to a fraction, we can multiply those two fractions as shown below,
$\Rightarrow \dfrac{1 \times 18}{3 \times 1}$
$\Rightarrow \dfrac{18}{3}$
We can reduce the fraction further. To do so, we must find the largest common element between the two numbers and eliminate them.
Here, we have 18 and 3. We know that 18 is a multiple of 3 and therefore, we can divide both the numerator and denominator by 3. This will give us
$\Rightarrow \dfrac{18}{3}=6$
$\Rightarrow \dfrac{3}{3}=1$
Let us put now substitute them in the main fraction, we can see the required answer is
$\Rightarrow \dfrac{6}{1}$
As per above discussion, we can write this as 6.
Therefore, the answer to the given question is 6.

Note: Here, we can directly multiply the given fraction and whole number without converting the whole number into fraction. We can cancel off similar numbers and find the answer. If we have to add or subtract fractions, then we must make sure that the denominator of both fractions is the same. But in case of multiplication and division, it is not necessary to make the denominators the same.