As usual, there are a few special rules to remember when looking at divisor and dividend. For one, the dividend doesn’t always have to be bigger than the divisor.
Back to the doughnuts from before, what if you weren’t so lucky as to have a full dozen to share? What if you had just 1 doughnut for all of your friends?
You still want to share, so you would be dividing 1 by 4. When the dividend is smaller than the divisor, your answer (the quotient) will be a decimal or a fraction.
Getting the fraction is easy enough since that will just be an expression of how you are dividing up the dividend.
Your doughnut situation would get you a 1⁄4, one being the doughnut, and 4 being you and your friends. The decimal value of 1⁄4 is .25, but you can learn more about that in another lesson.
Another thing to remember is that if your divisor is 1, the answer will always be the dividend. If you wanted to eat that dozen of doughnuts all by yourself, you would be dividing 12 by 1, which is just 12 since you, the 1, will get all 12 doughnuts.
The inverse of this is true, too. If you divide a dividend by a divisor of the same value, 12 ÷ 12, for example, the quotient will always be 1.
The last thing to note is that a divisor can never be 0. Think about it, if you have those twelve donuts and want to give them to no one, including yourself, what would that even look like? This is why if you plug any problem with a divisor of 0 into a calculator, you will get an answer of ‘undefined’.
Mathematicians are still trying to find ways to divide by 0, but for now, that mystery remains unsolved. Maybe you will be the one to crack it one day!
