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Main content

Decimals as words

Sal writes 0.17  and 40.03 in words.  He also writes twenty-four hundredths using numbers.

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Video transcript

- [Voiceover] Let's say that I had the number zero point one seven. How could I say this number? I said it one way, I said zero point one seven, but what are other ways that I could say it, especially if I wanted to express it in terms of tenths or hundredths or other places? And like always, try to pause the video and try think about it on your own. Alright, so there's actually a couple of ways that we could say this number. One is just to say zero point one seven. Other ways are to say look, I have a one in the tenths place, so that's going to be one tenth, one tenth and one tenth and I have a seven in the hundredths place, so this is a seven right over here in the hundredths place, so I can say one tenth and seven hundredths. Hun- Hundredths. And there you go. That's one way to say this number. Now another to think about it is just say the whole thing in terms of hundredths. So a tenth is how many hundredths? Well a tenth is the same thing as 10 hundredths, so you could say, you could say instead of a tenth, you could say this is 10 hundredths, and the way I'm writing it right now, very few people would actually do it this way. 10 hundredths and and seven hundredths. And seven hundredths. Well not I could just add these hundredths, if I have 10 hundredths and I have another seven hundredths, that's going to be 17 hundredths. So I could just write this down as 17 hundredths. Hundredths. And to make that intuition of how we could just call this 17 hundredths instead of just calling it one tenth and seven hundredths, let's actually count by hundredths. So that is one hundredth, that is two hundredth, and actually, let me just go straight to nine hundredths. So I skipped a bunch right over here. And what would be the next, how would I say 10 hundredths? Well 10 hundredths, let me write it this way, 10 hundredths is the same thing as one tenth. So if we go from nine hundredths, the next, if I'm counting by hundredths, the next one's going to be 10 hundredths. Now once again, 10 hundredths is the same thing as one tenth, just the same way that 10 ones is the same thing as one 10. I hope that doesn't confuse you, but we could keep counting. 10 hundredths, 11 hundredths, 12 hundredths, 13 hundredths, 14 hundredths, 15 hundredths, 16 hundredths, and then finally 17 hundredths. So hopefully that gives you a little intuition for why we can call this number, instead of just calling it zero point one seven, or one tenth and seven hundredths, we could call this 17 hundredths. So with that out of the way, let's do a couple of examples going the other way. Let's say we're given a name of a number or the words, and we wanna write it down as a decimal. So this is four tens and three hundredths. Alright, so four tens. So the four tens right over here. So actually let me just put some places over here, so this would be, if this is our tens place, and then this is our ones place, and then you're gonna have your decimal, and then you're gonna have your tenths place, tenths place, and then you're going to have, and I'll do this in a different color, your hundredths place. Hun- Hundredths place. So we're going to have four tens. Not tenths, four tens. So four tens, zero ones, zero ones, we got our decimal, they don't have any tenths over here so zero tenths, and then we have three hundredths. Three hundredths, so three hundredths. So four tens, which is the same thing as 40, and three hundredths right over here, so 40 point zero three. Let's do another one of these, this is kinda fun. So we have 24 hundredths. 24 hundredths. So by the logic that we saw in the first one, in the first one, we could just write this as, remember, this would be nine hundredths, and if we want one more hundredth, this would be 10 hundredths. So if we want to do 24 hundredths, it would just be zero point two four. And if you're saying well wait a minute, this looks like two tenths and four hundredths, you'd be right! But remember, so actually let me, I could re-write this as, I could re-write this as two tenths, two tenths and four hundredths. Let me say and four hundredths. Hundredths. But remember, a tenth is equal to 10 hundredths, so two tenths is the same thing as 20 hundredths. Hundredths. I have trouble saying- So this is the same thing as 20 hundredths and four hundredths. And four, let me write it neatly. Four hundredths. And of course 20 hundredths and four hundredths is the same thing as 24 hundredths. So hopefully that makes sense.