Multiplying fractions

You can easily see that a half of a half is a quarter, the diagram on the left illustrates it quite clearly.

In the same way you can see that one third of a half is a sixth.

If you write these as multiplications using 'x' instead of 'of' then we get:

1/2 x 1/2 = 1/4
and
1/3 x 1/2 = 1/6

In this case you multiply the numerators (e.g. 1x1) together to give the numerator for the answer (=1) and do the same with the denominators (e.g. 3x2) to get the denominator for the answer (=6) .

Try these

1/2 x 3/4 =    2/3 x 3/4 =    3/8 x 1/2 =

1/6 x 4/5 =    4/7 x 4/5 =    3/10 x 2/3 =