Question

How do you add a fraction to a decimal?

Answer 1

You need to convert them to similar format. Either both to decimal format or both to fractions.

Explanation:

There could be two ways of adding a fraction to a decimal.

(1) Convert fraction to the decimal format and add. If desired or required, the sum can again be converted into fraction.

(2) Convert the decimal to a fraction and then add two fractions together.

Answer 2

You need to either convert the decimal to a fraction or the fraction to a decimal.

Explanation:

Or at least that's the easiest way to go about adding a fraction to a decimal. For all intents and purposes (or porpoises) lets consider an example with fairly straight-forward numbers (no repeating decimals here). Lets say we wanted to add `1/5` and `0.50`, that that would look like this:

`1/5+0.50= ?`

"Uhhhh... that doesn't look nice..."

**Courtesy of: http://www.hakaproducts.com/voice-of-the-customer-lost-in-space/**

---------------------Converting to a decimal-----------------------

To convert a decimal to a fraction all we need to do is divide the numerator (top number) by the denominator* (bottom number). Like this:

`1div5=0.2`

Which, again, is the same as:

`1/5=0.20`

We know this because `5/5` equals `1`. In fact any fraction that has the same number in the numerator and the denominator equals 1 because if you divide a number by itself the quotient (result of division) is 1. We can further prove that `1/5` is equal to `0.20` by adding `0.20` 5 times in which case we get `1`, just like this:

`0.20+0.20+0.20+0.20+0.20= 1`

So now that we know what both numbers are in decimal form we can add the two numbers, like so:

`0.20+0.50= 0.70`

---------------------Converting to a Fraction-----------------------

As I mentioned above we can also convert the decimal `(0.50)` to a fraction. Now we may know off the top of our heads that `0.50` equals `1/2`, but we might not, this is not big deal because we can always add `50` plus `50` to get `100`, like this:

`50+50=100`

This also means that:

`0.50+0.50=1`

Since it takes two `0.50`'s to equal `1` this means that 1 divided by 2 (or `1/2`) is equal to `0.50`, in equation form:

`1/2= 0.50`

Now that we know that `0.50` equals `1/2`, we can set up our equation which looks like this:

`1/5+1/2= ?`

This is a little more tricky since we can't just add the two fractions, we have to find a common denominator. The easiest way to do this is to multiply the numerator and denominator of one by the denominator of the other, like so:

`1/5*(2/2)=2/10`

and

`1/2*(5/5)=5/10`

Now we can add both of these fractions together like this:

`2/10+5/10=7/10`

If we divide any number less than ten by `10` we get a decimal in this case if we divide `7` by `10` we get `0.70` since all we're really doing is moving the decimal point one place to the left. This can be expressed as an equation:

`7div10=0.70`

Surprise! We arrived at the same answer using two different methods!

I hope this helped!