Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
So far we've talked about a lot of numbers, both positive and negative, and
our world of numbers is looking pretty great. Still, we've really only been
counting by ones, whether above or below 0. This might be a problem however.
Thinking back to your famous birthday party, what if your friend had baked a few
cakes instead of making a ton of cupcakes? If you asked someone how much cake they
wanted and they only knew about integers, they would have to say that they either
wanted no cake at all, or they wanted 1 whole cake, or maybe even 2 entire cakes.
This doesn't seem very practical and you'll also run out of cake very quickly.
You would probably want to cut each cake into slices and then give each person just
a piece of the cake. Let's say that you cut 1 of the cakes into 8 pieces. If you
gave 5 friends each 1 of those slices, how much of that cake would be left over?