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Long division, a la Shmoop. In recent years, many species have been placed
on the endangered list. One of these species is the Underwear Fairy.
The underwear they depend on to survive has been depleted by the expanding Underwear Troll
population.
What used to be a plentiful bounty is now just a cool draft.
But wait -- the fairies have happened upon a pile of wild underwear.
Looks like there are 333 pairs of underwear to split evenly among 9 fairies.
Just how many pieces of underwear will each fairy get?
To set up the problem, draw your division box.
The dividend, or what's getting split up, goes inside the box. This is the 333 pairs
of underwear.
For the divisor, think outside the box. This is what you're dividing by.
Next decide if the first digit of the dividend can be divided by the divisor, or if 9 can
go into 3 at least once.
No?
Okay, so now see if 9 will go into the first two digits, or 33? Yes it can!
That means our quotient, or answer, will start above the second digit, or the tens place.
We need to find out "9 times what equals 33".
If you remember your times tables, you'll remember that 9 times 3 = 27, which is close
without going over.
Subtract 27 from 33 and that leaves us with a remainder of 6.
Bring down the last digit and we get 63.
Does 9 go into 63? Why yes it does. How many times?
7 times exactly in fact, which we write above the ones place.
7 times 9 is 63. 63 minus 63 is zero, so we have no remainder.
Yay, our answer is 37 pieces of underwear per fairy!
Even better, there's no remainder so the fairies won't wand-beam each other to death over the
leftover underwear.
That's a terrible way
to go.