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Comparing fractions: fraction models

Sal compares fractions visually with pies.

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Video transcript

- What I want to do in this video is compare the fraction 7/10 to the fraction 8/9. And, like always, I encourage you to pause the video and see if you can figure out where these things-- one of these is larger than the other, or whether they are equal. So, for me in this video, I want to think about it visually. And I'm going to do that using wholes of the same size that are circles. So let me draw them or let me get them, here. So there you go, so these are wholes of the same size. I'm gonna compare 7/10 of this whole of the circle to 8/9 or this whole. Which is a circle of the exact same size. If you're comparing 7/10 of a small circle to 8/9 of a bigger circle or 7/10 of a big circle to 8/9 of a smaller circle or a different shape, then you really can't make the comparison. But we're gonna compare 7/10 of the same whole to 8/9 of the same whole. Now, you can see the way that I've pre-drawn it. The circles are the same size, but I have divided them into a different number of sections. Here, since I have 10ths, I've divided into, you see that I've divided it into, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten sections. Over here, since we're dealing with 9ths, you can see I've divided it into one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine sections. But let's think about what 7/10 represents. It represents 7 of these 10 sections. So let me color them in. Let me get my coloring in tool. So that represents one, two, three four, five, six, seven out of the ten sections. Now what about 8/9? 8/9 is going to represent 8 of these 9 equal sections. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight of those sections. So which one of these is larger? Which one is larger? Well you can see very clearly, remember we're using 8/9 of the same whole and 7/10 of that exact same whole. You see that we have colored in more in magenta, or this pinkish color than we have in blue. So 8/9 is the larger of these two. Or we could say that 7/10 is less than 8/9. And once again, the way I remember what symbol to use, we always want it opening to the larger of the two number or the little, the tip is going to be pointing to the smaller of the two number. So, 7/10 is less than 8/9.