What is division?

In Math, division means splitting something into equal parts. When you split an item or a set of items or a number into equal parts, you are doing division. Look at the example below:

10 ÷ 5

You can read this as ten divided by five. It means you are going to take the number ten and see how many groups of five you can make out of it. You can actually get ten objects and divide it into groups of five as shown below.

We can see that there are two groups of five in ten. Therefore:

10 ÷ 5 = 2

Let’s look at another example:

8 ÷ 2

We can read this as eight divided by two. Look at the picture below.

The picture shows that you can get four groups of two in eight. Therefore:

8 ÷ 2 = 4

Division with a remainder

Sometimes you cannot divide one number perfectly by another number. If you wanted to divide 14 by three, you can write this as:

14 ÷ 3

Look at the picture below.

As you can see in the picture, if you divide fourteen by three, you can make four groups of three and you would have two left over. You refer to the two left over as the remainder. You can write it like this:

14 ÷ 3 = 4 R 2 (the R stands for remainder)

Division terms

It is important to know the following division terms:

• Dividend: this is the number being divided. In the example above, the dividend is 14
• Divisor: this is the number you are dividing by. In the example above the divisor is 3
• Quotient: this is the number of times the divisor can go into the dividend. In the example above the quotient is 4
• Remainder: This is any number which is left over. In the example above, the remainder is 2