Three-quarters for Dummies

Three-quarters is a phrase that is often used when we want to talk about a part or a proportion of something. Imagine you have a pizza, and you decide to share it with your friends. You cut the pizza into four equal pieces, and each piece represents a quarter of the whole pizza. Now, when we say three-quarters, it means that we have three out of those four equal pieces. So, in other words, it's like having most of the pizza, but not the whole thing. Can you picture that?

Let's say you have a toy box full of colorful building blocks. You have four different colors: red, blue, green, and yellow. Now, if I ask you to take out three-quarters of the blocks, it means you need to take out most of them, but still leaving a small part behind. You would take out three out of the four colors, leaving only one color untouched. It's like having a big portion of the blocks, but not all of them.

Now, let's look at another situation. Imagine you have a bag of marbles. In this bag, 16 of the marbles are blue, and 4 marbles are red. If I ask you how many marbles are blue, to find the answer, you need to think in terms of fractions. Remember, fractions help us talk about parts of a whole. In this case, the whole is the total number of marbles in the bag, which is 20. So, to calculate three-quarters of the marbles, we need to multiply the total number of marbles by three-quarters. In other words, we take 20 and multiply it by three-quarters, which gives us 15. So, in this example, three-quarters of the marbles are blue, which means there are 15 blue marbles in the bag.

To summarize, the phrase three-quarters refers to having most of something, but not all of it. It helps us talk about a part or a proportion of a whole. Whether it's sharing a pizza, picking colored blocks from a toy box, or calculating the number of marbles, understanding what three-quarters means allows us to express proportions and parts in a clear and simple way.