Question

a single box of thumb tacks weighed 3 1/2 if a teacher had 4 1/7 boxes of thumbtacks how much would their combined weight be?

Answer 1

Their combined weight would be 7 2/14. here are the steps of how I got my answer.
1. I made the answers into improper fractions. 3 1/2= 7/2 and 4 1/7= 29/7.
2. then I found the least common multiple (LCM) of 2 and 7 which is 14.
3. next in order to make both denominators become 14 I cant just make 7/2 into 7/14 and 29/7 into 29/14.  so I multiplied 29/7 by 2 which got me 58/14 and 7/2 by 7 which got me 42/14.
4. then I did 42/14+ 58/14= 100/14.
5. Then the last step was to make the improper fraction 100/14 into a proper fraction. Now how do you do that? BY DIVIDING! I divided 100 by 14 and I got my answer of 7 2/14.

Hope this helped! :)