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Division word problem: row boat

Created by Sal Khan.

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Video transcript

PROBLEM: "Omar rode his boat for a total of 50 miles over the past 5 days. And he rowed the same amount each day. How many miles did Omar row his boat each day?" So let’s just visualize what's going on. He is able to travel 50 miles. So let's make a – Let’s say this line represents the 50 miles that he travels. So this whole distance right over here is 50 miles. And he does it – They tell us that he does it over 5 days, and that each day, he does the same amount. So this 50 miles is if you were to add together all of what he did over the 5 days. And so, if you want to know how much he did each day, you essentially want to divide this 50 miles into 5 equal sections. And the length of each of those sections is the amount he did each day. So if we just visualize it – So that's one section – second section – third section – fourth – and fifth section. And actually, I didn't do that very well. It should look a little bit more equal than that. First, second – (And that's not going to – Let's see.) First, second, third, fourth, and fifth. And you don't have to actually do this. This is just to help visualize. So essentially, what we want to figure out is what is one of these distances? And as you can see in our visualization, this is really just taking our 50 miles and dividing it into 5 equal chunks. So we're essentially just taking 50, and we're going to divide it by 5. So 50 divided by 5 is going to be equal to 10. So if he goes 50 miles over 5 days, and you divide by the 5 days, he goes 10 miles each day. And we're done.