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Drinking Juice, Variation 3


Alignments to Content Standards: 6.NS.A.1

Task

Alisa had some juice in a bottle. Then she drank \frac38 liters of juice. If this was \frac34 of the juice that was originally in the bottle, how much juice was there to start?

IM Commentary

This task builds on a fifth grade fraction multiplication task, “5.NF Drinking Juice.” This task uses the identical context, but asks the corresponding “Group Size Unknown” division problem. See “Drinking Juice, Variation 2” for the “Number of Groups Unknown” version.

Solutions

Solution: Solution

From the question we know that Alisa drank \frac38 liters of juice, which was \frac34 of the amount of juice that was in the bottle.

Sol_1_c3f6005b951fbba4c8aae6772626fcef

What we really want to know is how many liters or what fraction of a liter of juice was in the bottle. Therefore we are looking for how many liters are in the whole (\frac44) amount of juice in the bottle. To answer this we will start by breaking the amount of juice in the bottle into three equal pieces.

Sol_2_ea482b42abd6f5b6a7b62a28bc5b2726

Since \frac38 of a liter is broken into three equal pieces, each piece represents \frac18 of a liter.

Sol_3_027d39a5bea50705dacd176c9bd8a6b3

What we are really concerned with is the total amount of juice in the bottle, and because the amount of juice in the bottle is divided up into fourths, we need four of them to make the whole.

Sol_4_f6b6180f6dcd92e6a057984eb2710928

Relabeling the picture will make it just a bit easier to see the answer.

Sol_5_f8f35c6f006711e7ca8e66a5e61136b9

Now it is clear that the total amount of juice in the bottle was \frac48=\frac12 of a liter.

Solution: A computational approach

This question is equivalent to asking, "\frac34 of what quantity of juice is \frac38 liter?" We can write this symbolically as \frac34 \times ? = \frac38

which is equivalent to the division problem \frac38 \div \frac34=?
Since \frac38 \div \frac34 = \frac38 \times \frac43 = \frac{12}{24} = \frac 12
we see we get the same answer as if we did reasoning about the context in the previous solution.

Alisa had \frac12 liter of juice in the bottle to start.