Question

How many fourths in 3 fourths? Write an expression to the problem.

Answer 1

3

Explanation:

To solve a problem like this, you have to turn the words into algebraic expression.

The question is "How many fourths in 3 fourths?"

So, let's give each "part" of the question an algebraic/numeric value:

How many (this is the variable, what we want to find out) : `x`
Fourths : 1/4
Are in (we can look at this to mean "are equal to") : `=`
3 fourths : 3/4

So, how many fourths are in 3 fourths can be written as:

`1/4x=3/4`

To solve for this, we just multiply by 4 on both sides to get:

`x=3`

So, there are `3` fourths in `3` fourths.
The statement above sounds somewhat "obvious" - it is not necessary to solve this type of question algebraically since it can be solved with logic too. We want to know how many fourths are in 3 fourths, so since we know we are dealing with the common "factor" of fourths, the question in a way answers itself - that there are `3` (what we want to find) fourths in 3 fourths.