Jul19

How to Solve a Multiplication Problem

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Do you want to know how to solve a multiplication problem? Have you already learned how to multiply? Did you know that solving problems is the best way to learn multiplication?

That’s why we are going to look at the different steps that we need to follow in order to solve a multiplication problem.

Let’s get to it and look at a multiplication problem:

multiplication problem

The witch Malitch made 10 bottles of potion to take to the annual Witches of the World convention. At this convention, all of the witches present new magic potions and the best one wins the Flying Broom Prize. To make each potion, she used 3 boxes of magic herbs that were 5 pounds each. How many pounds of magic herbs did she use in total?

1) The first thing we need to do is to read the problem carefully. In order to make sure that we understand it, we can ask ourselves questions about the problem, for example:

What did the witch Malitch make? She made 10 bottles of potion.
Why did she make them? She made them for a magic potion contest.

2) Once we understand what the problem said, we continue reading the question and analyze it by asking ourselves more questions:

What is the question asking me? The question is asking me how many pounds of magic herbs Malitch used in total, in all of the potions.
Do I need to do a math operation in order to solve the problem? Yes, because I only know how many pounds of magic herbs that each box had.
Ok, so what information do I need to use? (This last question is extremely important. You won’t always use all of the information that is given to you in a problem). I need to use the number of pounds that each box had (5), the number of boxes that she used for each potion (3) and lastly, the number of bottles of potions that she made (10).

3) Now, we can move on to think about the operation that we need to carry out:

We want to know how many pounds she used in total. We know that she used 3 boxes for each potion and that each box weighed 5 pounds, so:

For each potion she used 5 + 5 + 5 pounds. Or, expressed in a different way: 3 x 5 = 15 pounds.

Now we know that she used 15 pounds of magic herbs for each potion and we know that she made 10 bottles of potion, so:

In total, to make all of the potions, she used 15 x 10 = 150 pounds of magic herbs.

4) This last step is very important. We’ve gotten an answer, but now we need to critically reflect on the number that we got:

Finally, does it make sense that the answer (150) is greater than the numbers given in the problem (10, 3, 5)? Yes, it makes sense because these numbers referred to each potion or each box. The answer refers to the total amount of potions and the total amount of boxes.

Let’s solve the problem mentally using approximations: does it make sense that the number we got is 150? Yes. For example, it wouldn’t make sense if we got an answer of 30 because it’s too small of a number to be the answer of 10 x 3 x 5. It wouldn’t make sense either if we got 150,000 because it’s too big of a number.

So we have the final answer:

The witch Malitch used 150 pounds of magic herbs in total.

See? In order to solve a multiplication problem correctly, it’s not enough to just multiply all of the numbers, rather, we need to understand, analyze and reflect on what the problem says before we go ahead with the operation. We also need to check the answer.

Remember this for the next time that you have to solve a multiplication problem or any other problem for that matter!

Meanwhile, you can learn more about multiplication by clicking on the following links:

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