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For example, 20 apples divide into five groups of four apples, meaning that "twenty divided by five is equal to four". This is denoted as 20 / 5 = 4, or 20 / 5 = 4. [2] In the example, 20 is the dividend, 5 is the divisor, and 4 is the quotient.
In the second step, they were divided by 3. The final result, 4 / 3 , is an irreducible fraction because 4 and 3 have no common factors other than 1. The original fraction could have also been reduced in a single step by using the greatest common divisor of 90 and 120, which is 30.
For example, using single-precision IEEE arithmetic, if x = −2 −149, then x/2 underflows to −0, and dividing 1 by this result produces 1/(x/2) = −∞. The exact result −2 150 is too large to represent as a single-precision number, so an infinity of the same sign is used instead to indicate overflow.
For example, is not in lowest terms because both 3 and 9 can be exactly divided by 3. In contrast, is in lowest terms—the only positive integer that goes into both 3 and 8 evenly is 1. Using these rules, we can show that 5 / 10 = 1 / 2 = 10 / 20 = 50 / 100 , for example.
Dividing 272 and 8, starting with the hundreds digit, 2 is not divisible by 8. Add 20 and 7 to get 27. The largest number that the divisor of 8 can be multiplied by without exceeding 27 is 3, so it is written under the tens column. Subtracting 24 (the product of 3 and 8) from 27 gives 3 as the remainder.
Long division is the standard algorithm used for pen-and-paper division of multi-digit numbers expressed in decimal notation. It shifts gradually from the left to the right end of the dividend, subtracting the largest possible multiple of the divisor (at the digit level) at each stage; the multiples then become the digits of the quotient, and the final difference is then the remainder.
The combination of these two symbols is sometimes known as a long division symbol or division bracket. [8] It developed in the 18th century from an earlier single-line notation separating the dividend from the quotient by a left parenthesis. [9] [10] The process is begun by dividing the left-most digit of the dividend by the divisor.
For the multiplicative inverse of a real number, divide 1 by the number. For example, the reciprocal of 5 is one fifth (1/5 or 0.2), and the reciprocal of 0.25 is 1 divided by 0.25, or 4. The reciprocal function, the function f(x) that maps x to 1/x, is one of the simplest examples of a function which is its own inverse (an involution).